Vision
A Story of Deep Time
The Darkness hides
the deep, deep places of the sky,
And shakes the roots
of the exalted pillars of the rooves
which shelter our creations.
This Darkness finds,
the dark, dark cracks which lace our spires,
And further fills,
the foundations of this edifice with fear,
The things we built are double edged.
This is the irony of breaking,
what made us stronger, finally kills.
Without Vision, a People Perish.
To Naomi
Introduction
There was a whirling click in the cold-sleep chamber ensconcing sub-major Clement of the third expeditionary fleet, causing him progressively more irritation. Some subcontractor had put a part in the cooling system backwards, he thought irritably. Crossing the void in the grandiosely named Ascent-Via-Darkness had never exactly been a pleasant cruise, but four hundred years of shuttling reserve forces around the Empire’s many war zones had definitely caused the experience to fray.
Clement tapped on the terminal floating several inches in front of his face, hoping this would prompt some further reaction from the sub-AI handling the reactivation of the reserves. He succeeded only in bringing up the same message he’d previously seen when he’d been groggily roused from cold-sleep, as well as further distressing the already heavily scratched display. (SUBAI//LOW//SECRT) HIGH ORBIT AROUND VERMILLION ACHIEVED. TRANSITED FLIGHT TIME 3x10^8 SECONDS. SECURITY PROCESSING OF FORCES IN PROGRESS. STANDBY.
As he always did at this juncture, Clement wondered why more of the processing couldn't be done during the actual transit between the stars, or simply decide which people the Empire was going to trust before dragging them multiple light years away from wherever they were before the Warminds decided their participation was needed to grease the wheels of the current conflict. He wasn't sure if this was due to some obscure piece of operations research, or they just didn't care enough to look into it.
After what seemed like an interminable delay the terminal began to blink, and some subsection of the AI controlling the Ascent started flashing questions to Clement. “Sub-Major Clement, have you ever supported the destruction of the Empire? Where did you go to school? Describe the color blue. Have you attempted to subvert fleet AIs? What types of women do you find attractive?...” and so on.
Clement allowed himself to focus on the irritation of the bad fan in the cooling system and let the questions wash over him. No doubt on a server somewhere on the Ascent, a sub-AI trained on countless responses to such questionnaires was plodding through his replies, looking for anything that might indicate a statistical anomaly and flag him for further processing. Good luck with that he thought sourly.
After a certain amount of questioning, the AI shut off and a bored security officer took over. Having passed through the process countless times Clement had perfected the art of presenting a certain bureaucratic blandness, which brought the interview to a swift conclusion. The security officer asked a few follow up questions, and then signed off.
At last the terminal went blank. It flickered a few times, flashed the symbol of the Empire’s fleet, and then printed a message indicating he was cleared for duty. Report to etc etc etc. Clement’s eyes glazed over as the message ran on into uninteresting details. As ever, the AI had failed to penetrate into his inner self. While he had never believed in the ship’s security staff’s ability to discover anything interesting, there was always the chance that they would randomly flag someone based on a quirk of their algorithms, noise being strenuously magnified into signal. If that happened, there would be no end of hullabaloo and paperwork.
Just as well that hadn't happened this time, he thought tiredly. It wouldn't do to have security investigating him, now that he’d decided to subvert a Warmind, the fleet, and quite possibly the Empire.
Chapter 1
Extinction. The one thing the Harmosts of the Empire were sworn to prevent. The Warminds, hidden in asteroids, or cooled deep under oceans, or hidden away in cave systems around planets orbiting the furthest stars were all entrusted with one sacred task. Peer through deep time, and plot a course which lead to the limitless existence of the Empire, and its protection from the countless barbarian tribes encircling it.
It was during one of the countless border skirmishes against a barbarian race with a name unpronounceable in the Imperial tongue, and a culture that had diverged from the common terran source countless millennia ago, where Clement finally lost his faith in the Imperial mission. Activated from reserve status again, he had been moved fifty light years out from fleeting stage grounds to help in the struggle.
The goal his unit had been brought along for was to help interface between the archaic cybernetic systems of their adversaries, and the almost limitless computational potential of the Warminds. In interstellar campaigns, almost any conflict could be won by bringing superior computation power to bear. No one traveled space or colonized planets without AIs and expert systems to navigate, communicate, regulate life support and cold sleep systems, or even simply to plot targeting vectors. Once those networks were overwhelmed, it was only a matter of time before death became inevitable. Unfortunately, this frequently required a body next to a potential hardwired connection, since everyone was keenly aware of this Achilles heel of the whole interstellar enterprise, and tended to take serious efforts to prevent unwanted packets from transiting their networks.
In this case, the Harmost in charge of the expedition had decided that the main fleet would stand off while a group of marines took Clement and a smattering of his comrades on planet to provide an initial access vector for whatever network bugs the Warmind they’d dragged along was cooking up. Once they’d gained that initial toehold all calculations indicated a swift victory over the current group of barbarians they’d been tasked with subduing.
In a run-down conference room aboard the light carrier The-Will-Like-Lighting, sub-Colonel Fletcher, a twenty-year veteran who had for most of his career avoided leaving the air conditioned safety of fleet headquarters, and was now officer in charge of “Herding the cybernetists” as he put it, gave up on a desultory effort to get the room’s laser pointer to work and started pointing at his slide deck.
“Alright guys, these savages have been opposing Imperial interests in this sector for too long. Now we have to go down and help the Marines deal with them. We’ll put down on the southern continent, find one of their backbone routers, then we’ll be in. Shouldn’t be a hard job. I’ll take Clement, Max, Rachel, and Sam down. The rest of you stay up here and provide support if we need help customizing the exploits. Here’s what we know about their network topology.”
Clement felt his eyes start to glaze over when he saw they were on slide 20 of 75, when one of the other members of the unit, the historical film buff of the group, and happy not to be leaving the comfort of the ship joked “Why don't we just nuke ‘em from orbit? It's the only way to be sure”. This got a few guffaws. “Because,” said Fletcher grumpily, “the Lightning's Warmind thinks there's something on these guys’ network that might be interesting. Says this place is some sort of confounding variable, ruining some of their recent simulation runs. We have to go in, setup the data link, and find out what's in there. Then the fleet can vapourize what's left from orbit.”
Fletcher started chugging through his slide deck again, and the rest of the members of the cy-corp sunk back into apathy immediately. Having traveled forty light years, with little to do, and no knowledge of the local planet beyond whatever they could glean from a short perusal of the article on the fleet wiki,
most couldn't rouse themselves from the stupor the boredom of the journey had brought on.
On the flight down to the planet surface, things had begun to go wrong almost at once. The Marines were irritated that they’d been assigned to “Babysit a bunch of fuckin lazyass nerds”, as the sergeant in charge had put it in an unguarded moment. Worse, the group had not been provisioned properly. The Marines were issued their normal powered armor systems, but the programmers-at-arms as they were not so affectionately known, were not expected to come under fire, and had only standard fatigues. This was unfortunate, because the moment the drop ships touched down they came under fire. Two of the five cybernetists were killed right away, including Fletcher who was shot in the head right as he stepped out onto the planet.
Clement, disoriented by the transition from dim lighting to the noise and heat of the planet, found himself being rushed by two marines away from the dropship, along with his two surviving comrades, Max, a recent addition to the unit who hardly ever looked up from his terminal, and Rachel, a mousy girl who spent most of her time criticizing whatever came to hand. They both looked equally confused by the transition, but Rachel was recovering the fastest of the three. She was beginning to mutter a surprisingly inventive stream of curses, directed at whoever was trying to kill them, the Marines who were dragging them, and whatever staff officer up in the fleet had decided this sort of thing was a good use of her time.
“Asshole muscle bound idiots, let go of me,” she muttered to the Marines frog marching them to safety. One of the Marines grunted as shrapnel bounced off his armor, but didn’t respond until they reached cover in the shade of a small sand dune. The marine escort deposited the three of them unceremoniously, and Clement heard the crackle of the marine sergeant's voice over the radio: “You guys stay here and stay down until we get the situation under control. We’ll be back.”
Next to Clement, Max was muttering in perplexity. “They knew we were coming; Clement they knew we were coming. We took out all their satellites from orbit, but they still knew, how? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense; it doesn't.”
Clement shook himself out of his daze and turned to Max. “I don't know Max, have you still got the gear? Maybe if we get on their network we can find out.”
Max pointed over at his backpack, “I’ve got the gear but I don't know if it got hit during the landing. Also the marines were pretty rough with it. It might not still work.”
“It's mil-spec stuff Max,” Clement said. “It’ll still work, so let's grab it. Get Rachel, and tell the Marines we can still get this done.”
The sergeant-major in charge of the remaining marines thumped over in his powered armor to the three remaining cybernetists. His voice came through the armor’s speaker, distorted by stress and bad wiring: “Your group still have your stuff? We can still reach the target, but we need to move now.”
Hustled by the Marines across the sand dunes, flinching repeatedly when a weapon discharged loudly somewhere in the distance, and fearful at the shrapnel hitting the sand—they eventually arrived at a grey bunker. Obviously expecting some sort of smart card to be presented the door flashed an angry red when they tried to open it. “Hack this shit already,” the marine sergeant yelled.
“With what?” Rachel shouted back angrily, “They didn't give us the key material for the door. They didn't even tell us there was a door. This was supposed to be just a building with a network terminal. We haven't got a data link back to the ship. There's no way we can crack this on the fly.”
“Well, figure something out quick. We’ll fucking get shot out here,” the marine yelled back.
Without much hope, Clement grabbed the backpack from Max. He ducked slightly as a projectile glanced off a marine's armor and pinged into the sand nearby. Grabbing a terminal, he slapped a connector onto the door card reader, and—unable to think of any better idea—he kicked off a program to brute force the key. Astonishingly, the program reported almost instant success. Clement blinked several times, peering more closely at the terminal screen. He tried to understand what had happened. The software was reporting a success that had a probability of less than one in ten trillion, saving thousands of hours of computation.”Umm..the doors open,” he called out, dodging inside the opening door.
The air conditioned hum of a server room came as a shock after the glare of the desert sun and the sound of small arms fire. Clement blinked and took stock, trying to focus and remember what he’d come here to do. Find a network node install a tap. See what sort of information was going across this isolated router in the desert. He dimly heard Rachel pulling Max into the door behind him while the marines milled around outside, their powered armor making entry difficult.
Clement moved closer to the racks of servers and pulled out his terminal again. Best to get started before Max and Rachel started arguing over the best course of action. Clipping his terminal to the server, he began launching the worms and attack programs the cyberneticists back on The-Will-Like-Lighting had thought would be useful here. The terminal buzzed with activity as information about the target network was deciphered and security protocols were subverted.
Suddenly, the mail indicator on his terminal began to flash. Clement blinked in perplexity, hardly able to cope with this new development on top of the rest of the day. He shouldn't be receiving electronic messages on this terminal, on a hostile network, but there it was. He clicked the message open.
Flash. The sensation is like falling. Clement isn’t sure where he is, dimly hearing the hum of the server room, but also a roaring like water. Then he sees.
Flash. Rain. Black rain. Sleeting down across an entire planet. Somehow Clement knows that this is not right, that what he is seeing is a divergence from nature so intense, that words can't ever be formed that would fully express it. Above he sees ships beginning to break orbit, firing their thrusters as they prepare to engage their long range engines and begin the long cruise between the stars. From their formation structure they must be Imperial ships.
From the planet there seems to come a wail, although Clement can't hear anything—certainly not with his ears. But he knows somehow that the suffering on the planet is profound.
Flash. Clement walks the streets of a great city, where the black liquid pools, still sleeting down in torrents. Here and there he sees people, most standing stock still. Those that still have the strength writhe, but most are past that, blocked off entirely from the world, not even able to show the nature or depth of their suffering.
Flash. The last of the Imperial fleet breaks from high orbit, following its fellows into retreat. Scans show that the planet has been sterilized right down to its core, which flares as the black rain seeps down, seeking to exterminate all life, down to the smallest single celled organism. The planet must be left empty. The urgency of extinction overpowers everything else. With horror Clement realizes that the Empire has unleashed this attack on their own people, because of a profound fear. Something is coming, something against which there is no defense, something so much worse than what they’ve just unleashed on the world, that they’d used one of their most horrifying weapons on their own people, just to buy a little more time to prepare.
Flash. The Empire is dying. The Empire has become a monster. They know it, they hate it, but there is no way out from oneself. The thrusters flare, throwing the last ship out into the void.
Flash. Clement is himself again. He sees nothing of what he has just experienced in his bones. He’s sweating, but he hears that the airconditioner is still going full blast against the desert heat. He looks at the text of the message and sees:
“Attachment. Credentials: Harmost access for Vermillion Warmind.” Clement reaches in his pack and without thinking pulls out a storage drive, saving the attachment then pocketing the device. He breathes raggedly, feeling faint. He feels Max jostle into him, trying to see what Clement has already done on the network so he can start the next phase of the attack. Clement deletes the message and hands the terminal to h
im saying “Got started, I think it's ready for you.” Behind them both he can hear Rachel powering up some of their communications gear, trying to get comms back to the ship. Max grabs the terminal and begins calling to her, updating her on what this section of the planet’s network looks like and where the likely nodes of interest are. Clement is already tuning them out, the images of death playing over and over again in his mind.
Max and Rachel are well-trained, and their programs have been honed in trillions of cycles of simulation by the Warminds. They have been tested across known space. The barbarians have nothing to stop them once they are in. They loot the barbarian networks of everything that seems worth having, then begin burning it out. They contact the fleet and are told that evacuation is coming. Informed of their situation, a light element of the fleet is detached into low orbit. It begins firing on the enemy around their position. As their weapons flicker down and glass the sand hiding their enemies everyone in the bunker beings to relax.
One of the Marines came up to Rachel as they waited for evacuation. On finding her disinterested he decided to be more forcefully persuasive. Rachel began beating her hands against him, unable to make herself heard over the shock of it. For the first time since Clement has known him, Max is incandescent with fury. He flung himself bodily on the marine responsible, pounding against his back in rage. The marine hurls him back against the wall, but then the noise attracts attention and he leaves, stalking away muttering. A low roar announced the arrival of their transport, and Clement and Max hurry themselves and a dazed Rachel up the ramp of the ship to safety. On the ride back, Rachel is nearly catatonic from shock. Max is slightly concussed, and Clement is unable to focus. The images of what he’s seen racing through his head.
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