Sons of the Gods

by James Von Ohlen

  Though his marines were the finest warriors that the universe had to offer, genetically altered and enhanced with the latest bionics, far outnumbering their enemies, he watched with horror as they were slaughtered. Cut down by men that moved and fought like Gods. Outnumbered and outgunned, but still victorious.

  It was unbelievable the first few times he had witnessed it through the digital eyes of observation probes released from the Behemoth. How could so few stand against so many who held so much power? It was like something out of mythology.

  Like the Aesir of old earth legends smiting Jotuns in their hordes before their eventual fall at the end of days.

  He began to see the threat that the technologies of this place, this fucking backwater, presented to the dominion of the UN. To his nation. To his people. He saw the advantage the UN would have once this planet was brought to heel. He saw that if they could not be brought to heel, they could not be allowed to live. They would join or be destroyed, to protect all of the UN from them.

  Further bombardments were ordered and he happily obliged. These had little to no effect. Some type of defensive shields had been erected around vital targets and some system was shooting down incoming ordinance with extreme efficiency. Perhaps one in a thousand weapons made it to its target.

  More marines were sent onto the ground. As many as he could spare, leaving an emergency reserve onboard for security and defensive purposes. He watched from his eagle’s eye view for as long as he could, directing his marines when possible. Helping them win a few hard fought victories. Pyrrhic victories at that. The weapons unleashed poisoned the planet, leaving vast swaths of it unusable for centuries to come.

  Technologies were taken from the defeated warriors and brought back. To be inspected. To be learned from and turned against the Coalition. Though they were undoubtedly doing the same. It was becoming a race to loot as much technology as possible from this place before it was utterly destroyed.

  Nearly every population center on the planet was embroiled in battle reflecting that in the space surrounding it. Defenders fought both UN and Coalition and UN and Coalition fought one another and defenders. In a few instances all three battled simultaneously.

  More attempts at seizing the Behemoth were made, and they were almost successful. The captain was forced to remain hardwired into his command throne for a full two weeks without pause, fighting off their attacks. Exhausted, he was finally forced to retire to a recovery session in a regen-vat.

  During that fortnight of unconsciousness he had missed much. What had begun as a routine expedition to bring another world into the fold had grown into one of the largest battles in the decades long Civil War. Reinforcements had steadily arrived in hourly increments, if not more frequently, on both sides. Once there they had instantly joined the fight. The battle had become an unending shifting of masses of ships around the planet they both sought to conquer with no end to the exchange of ordinance.

  With no end in sight.

  When he emerged, orders from the UN admiral brought the Behemoth and its battle group to near orbit space of the planet, to crush a sortie by the Coalition and to destroy planetary defense satellites.

  Finally the decisive blow was struck.

  Tungsten penetrators. Nearly fifty meters long and two and a half meters wide. Shaped like the bullets used in ancient weapons. Decidedly low tech, but they had gotten the job done yet again.

  It was suspected they were being launched from weaponized satellites sent up from the planet and hidden in the debris of dead ships. From there, they launched their payloads. Almost undetectable until it was too late. Railguns firing discarding sabots that carried the tungsten penetrators.

  Warning klaxons blared across the captain’s mind as the weapons sped towards the Behemoth at incredible speed. From this range, the ship would not be able to move before out of their path. Defensive batteries roared to life at his command, lasers targeting the huge projectiles.

  A smile crossed his lips as he sat in his command throne, dozens of laser blasts scoring the incoming threat. Crisis averted yet again. The Behemoth remains invincible. His smile faded as the alarms continued, still showing the threat.

  More batteries were brought to bear, but they seemed to be causing no damage. Weapons that large could only be guided torpedoes, he thought. The hits on them should have vaporized their hulls and detonated their payloads. He couldn’t have known what they actually were.

  More hits and still they came, he began to panic. The ship responded to his commands. Full throttle reverse and downward out of the path of the attack, but the mass of the ship was too great and the force of the thrusters too small to move in the time given.

  A dozen of the projectiles tore into the Behemoth, along the starboard flank, ripping through steel and ceramic armor like tissue paper. Destroying all in their path before passing cleanly through the ship and out the other side where they continued through unfortunate warships in the distance. Pain tore through the captain’s body as he felt every inch of the ship being mortally wounded.

  Alarms overcame his senses as damage reports filed in from the areas not completely destroyed. Fires tore through the interior of the ship where there was still oxygen to burn and the greasy black smoke from them spilled out into the void like the lifeblood of the stricken battleship.

  He issued the order for all personnel to abandon ship. Impossibly fast, lifepods in the still functioning sections shot out into the void, already signaling for pickup. Cowards, he thought as he watched them go. He considered turning what weapons still functioned on them, but it would be of no use. They were only following his commands, and they might still redeem themselves in the future.

  Few systems remained at his command. Life support was gone. Engines reduced to ten percent. Half of his weapons utterly destroyed. Reactors breached and containment units failing. The gravity-well of the pathetic planet reached out and grabbed hold of the Behemoth and it began to fall, trailing its crumbling and burning body behind it. Fires winked as they were snuffed out by the void in a sight familiar to him, but only on the other side of it.

  The command throne attempted to eject the ship’s captain, forcing him into an escape pod, but he refused. He was no pathetic coward to flee from a fight. He was going to see this through to the end. He ordered the bridge sealed and pressurized with what air remained before taking what control he could of the ship’s path.

  Plummeting towards the planet below, he guided it as best as he could. Aiming for a large city growing in his view that seemed to have escaped the worst of the orbital bombardment. There he would find his vengeance. Targeting reticles popped into view in the computer interface in his mind as he marked each area that might be populated. At his command all remaining weapons began to fire on the cities below. If the Behemoth was going to die, it would take many with it.

  A torrent of death shot ahead of the battleship as it entered the atmosphere. Steaks of fire trailed behind the missiles carrying their payloads towards their targets, leaving clouds of exhaust that almost instantly blurred to indistinct blobs in the void, suddenly coming into sharp contrast as the weapons entered the atmosphere. The missiles launched had mostly been designed for use against other ships in the void. Explosions danced across the captain’s sensor aided vision as the heat of entering the atmosphere of the planet at such high speed burned through the chassis of several of the missiles and detonated the payload held within. Another weapon burst of its own accord and dispersed a cloud of smaller warheads, streaking in all directions towards their targets below.

  At his relayed command all nearby UN ships joined in the bombardment as well. They realized what had happened and what he meant to do. And they sought vengeance as well. Payloads that in centuries past would have been against the rules of warfare streaked towards population centers below. Biological. Chemical. Nuclear. They had been well prepared to exterminate any resistance they had met.

  Streaks of light rose to meet the descending bombardment. Pla
netary defenses seeking to knock them from the sky. Some found their marks. Others did not. Explosions rippled across the surface of the world below as the surviving weapons from the first wave finally struck.

  His joy at the sight was soon overcome by the pain flaring across his body. Intense burning. Sensory feedback from thermal monitoring units spread across the Behemoth’s hull warning him that the temperature was getting dangerously high. Of course it was, he thought. The ship was entering the atmosphere. As if on cue, the entirety of the monstrous battleship began to shudder and vibrate.

  The captain fought to remain conscious against the pain, now screaming at the top of his lungs. Before he lost himself completely in the burning, some part of his mind that still functioned rationally turned off the input from the thermal sensors. Freeing him to do more crucial work in the short time he had left.

  Another blow from one of his weapons, a massive slug launched from a mass-driver obliterated what was surely a simple farming collective far below him and he couldn’t help but smile. Dying by the hands of the Behemoth was as close to an honorable death as the people below would experience. If they had simply submitted, they would still be alive. It served them right.

  All of his will power was funneled into keeping what little control he could exert over the direction of the rapidly plummeting battleship. Defensive fire tore into the ship. Pain flared throughout him again as though he had been the one struck, not the Behemoth. Seeking an appropriate target for his rage he searched fast and hard before finally identifying his final victim.

  Andersonville. A simple enough name. He had set foot on several planets that had cities with that name. He had bombed a few more that bore cities with that name. Here on this distant backwater of a world that had become the site of the largest battle in the Civil War, he found another Andersonville. This one, though, bore some significance.

  Here on this planet, it was home to a vast military installation housing the central command of the planet’s defenses as well as a large number of civilian contractors and the families associated with both. There had been much effort to destroy the city from orbit, but so far its defenses had proved formidable.

  Marines had landed with the intent of capturing the city. They had been repulsed at high cost to the defenders. Or so it was hoped. Spec Ops teams had been dispatched to assassinate enemy leaders there as well, hoping to deal a blow to the morale of the planet’s defenders. Perhaps to even end their resistance altogether.

  The men dispatched there had disappeared. Though it was difficult to really call them men. Most Spec Ops soldiers fielded by the UN had very little of their humanity left. After a process called ‘full conversion’ they were basically highly modified human brains in robotic shells.

  Despite the efforts of the UN fleet, this place still stood. Openly defying them. The captain would end that nonsense in but a few moments. He fired the steering engines that still functioned, adjusting his path as the Behemoth fell. Still shaking violently, the badly damaged ship began to fall apart. Great pieces of it spinning away from the main body and plummeting independently to the earth below.

  Each piece lost was a piece of the captain’s body gone.

  Defensive fire rising to meet the falling ship intensified, threatening to break it apart. The bio-comps implanted in his brain that allowed him to control the ship from his command throne worked frantically to find a path through the projectiles, but it was futile. He rerouted them to re-engaging the primary engines. A final alarm warned him that radiation leaking from breached reactors had reached a critical level.

  The captain smiled as he saw his vengeance within his grasp. Through his vast neural network he fired the main engines one last time, adding speed to the Behemoth’s descent upon Andersonville, and intentionally causing a simultaneous meltdown of all reactors that were still on line. If the impact from the ship didn’t destroy the target, it would have to be abandoned by the defenders due to the lethal radiation levels it would carry for the coming centuries and millennia.

  Laughing manically, the captain descended amidst a storm of defensive fire from batteries below. The only thing that stopped his laugh was a dislodged support beam shattering his skull and pulping his brain a fraction of a second after the fragmented remains of the Behemoth hit the ground. In the milliseconds before its total destruction, the computer array of the battleship collected the captain’s memories and transmitted them in a coded burst to another vessel in orbit far above.

  “He knew his role well. The pure hatred he felt for his enemy was the mark of a true warrior. Struck down, yet still triumphant in death. His death, as well as his final victory will always be honored.” He spoke out loud in reverent tones as his voice filled the room.

  He sat alone. In his private quarters where none others were allowed. His right arm whirred slightly as he reached up and pushed his hair out of the way before removing the data plug from the neural interface port on the right side of his skull. The same he used to interface with various computers and his battle armor.

  The technology was old. Even older than he was. But it was still effective. It allowed him to see what others had seen. To feel their emotions and their sensory input as well as allowing him to discern their thought patterns, if not their thoughts. The arm whirred again as he lowered it. A small gear or actuator running out of synch.

  That will need to be seen to by the armorer, he thought. A moment’s lapse in his mental faculties. The armorer had been dead for some 500 years. He would have to fix it himself if parts were still available. If not he would make do. As he always had.

  He stood from his seat, not unlike the command throne the captain of the Behemoth had stayed in to the bitter end. Arching his back and flexing his arms and legs as he rose. He could feel the power there. Still strong, after all these years. His eyes fell upon his golden armor where it stood, perpetually at the ready for his use.

  The custom battle suit contained some of the most advanced technology available at the time it had been constructed. The cost of producing that single suit alone had been greater than the original construction of the Behemoth. Much had been learned from captured Veldt technology and the lessons had been applied where they could be. Synthetic muscle fibers and neural interface systems far beyond standard UN issue were at his command when he wore the Golden Fleece, as he had taken to calling it. Adaptive force fields destructively interfered with incoming laser and EM beams as well as knocking slower moving hard rounds from the air around him. He regretted that he had not been able to deploy the suit in battle more than a handful of times. Using it had been a surreal experience.

  A few strides brought him before a collection of data plugs like the one he had just removed from his head. They held a place of honor in his personal chambers. Held in a case that sat atop what could only be described as an altar.

  A special stasis field had once helped preserve the data plugs and their precious cargo. It had long since failed, leaving their regular maintenance and care to him and him alone. A task he relished. They helped remind him why he was here. Why he kept fighting this war after so long.

  The data plug detailing the final weeks of the life of the captain of the Behemoth was put back in its place with reverence. Once, long, long ago, he had known the man’s name. Had spoken to him many times. Now the long dead captain’s name escaped him. Lost somewhere in the accumulated cobwebs of his mind. Part of the price he paid for immortality. He trailed his fingertips over the collected memories of so many others before settling on another he wished to experience.

  He could have sent the data plug back to its place with a mere thought and retrieved another to view just as easily. The computers still functioning in his quarters could interpret his brain activity with extremely high precision and using a series of electromagnets and projected forcefields, they could move objects as he desired without him needing to use his hands.

  But if the power failed at some dangerous moment, the precious data plugs might be damage
d. The memories they held might be corrupted. Worse yet, they might be destroyed.

  The data plug he pulled was from the mind of the commander of the Spec Ops units that he had dispatched to the planet’s surface during the most critical phase of the battle. He sat back onto his chair, signaling the neural interface probes that automatically sought the outlets grafted into his body to stand down for the time being. He wanted to experience these memories fully, without the distraction of input from other systems.

  He lifted the data plug to its interface port and snapped it in place. He almost had time to note that the whirring sound in his arm had stopped before he was submerged in the memory.

  Incoming hostile fire blazed around him, shattering the concrete rubble he was using as cover. Bits and pieces of it flew like shrapnel, clanging off of the shoulders and gorget of his thick armor. He rose from his crouching position, feeling the immense strength in his artificial body, and fired quickly at the first target he saw before rolling back behind cover. Immediately he began moving to a new position among the ruins. Fire and move. To remain static was to be outmaneuvered. To be outmaneuvered was to be killed.

  His aim was true and his shot found its mark squarely in the chest of one of his enemies. Where it did little to no damage. The mass of the laser beam he had fired was negligible so the force of impact was non-existent on a man-sized target. There was no force exerted against the man by the blast, so he barely moved. The armor fielded by his foes had become highly reflective to the frequencies of the laser rifles being used by his men in the past few days, meaning their primary weapons had little effect.