by CH Gideon
Xi’s charging mechs unleashed just over two hundred anti-missile rockets from forty kilometers to the east; those rockets could potentially intercept the Finjou platforms in time to make a difference. But the simple truth of the matter was that Clover was about to get hit hard.
But before that seemingly inevitable blow landed, the Bahamut Zero joined the fray.
The northern edge of Jenkins’ tactical plotter erupted as the Zero launched the most impressive one-vehicle attack Jenkins had ever seen—ninety-six SRMs, twenty-four MRMs, and sixteen LRMs were on intercept courses with the enemy ordnance. The Zero’s sixteen railguns skewered the fan-shaped flight of missiles from its northern flank, tearing twenty-two down. Xi’s people to the east lent their own railguns to the effort, erasing another nine missiles from the sky with direct weapons fire.
The Bahamut Zero’s MRMs veered in pursuit of the breaking Finjou aircraft wing, while the SRMs sped off to intercept the ordnance headed Clover’s way. Meanwhile, the Zero’s LRMs climbed to an identical plane as that occupied by the majority of the Finjou missiles, and one by one, those sixteen Terran LRMs winked off the board as brilliant flashes enveloped their positions.
It all happened too fast to process consciously, but even in the heat of the moment, Jenkins realized that General Akinouye had unleashed sixteen Blue Boys. They weren’t potent enough to reliably eliminate a Viper-class aerospace fighter, but they were more than capable of disrupting any known missile system up to a capital-grade torpedo.
Thankfully for Clover Battalion, there were no torpedoes in the enemy missile flight.
A hundred Finjou missiles were vaporized mid-flight by the Blue Boys, and the three-pronged wave of Terran anti-missile rockets slammed into the remaining missiles of the enemy barrage before they descended on the mechs of Clover Battalion.
The sky was filled with ear-splitting reports as rockets struck missiles mid-flight. Razorback coil guns swept across the sky, weaving back and forth like festival searchlights. Tens of thousands of anti-personnel rounds were sent up in a desperate attempt to intercept whatever managed to pierce the makeshift missile shield, and those coil guns even managed to intercept at least four Finjou missiles.
But in spite of the impressive display of counterfire, the missile shield was not quite perfect.
Five missiles slipped through, annihilating three of Clover’s mechs and badly damaging a fourth. Warcrafter was spared the enemy’s wrath, and thankfully not a single tactical nuke pierced the improvised missile shield. Jenkins’ HUD was filled with damage reports and status updates as Clover Battalion, down to just a single company of battle-ready mechs after the furious exchange, mopped up the rest of the enemy droids and assumed a classic tortoiseshell formation.
“Railguns up,” Jenkins commanded, assigning fleeing aircraft as targets as they bolted off at top speed.
As Clover waited for their railgun capacitors to charge, the Bahamut Zero’s MRMs bore steadily down on their fast-fleeing aircraft. The Finjou fighters broke left and right, up and down, rolled, and even flipped to fire lasers at the pursuing fighter-killers. The last-ditch laser fire sniped a half-dozen MRMs from the sky, but the majority of the remaining MRMs struck their targets, obliterating fifteen enemy fighters outright.
Jenkins quickly revised his railgun packages and gave the order, “Engage targets.”
The ten remaining railguns of Clover Battalion lanced out, stabbing across the sky in pursuit of the disbanded enemy fighter craft. Of the eight targets engaged by Clover’s railguns, six were smoked, but two survived long enough to escape what was likely the last exchange of this particular engagement.
Jenkins’ hands trembled with the familiar thrill of battle, and even the mech’s chemical support systems could not prevent the inevitable post-fight letdown. His entire body seemed to deflate, and his razor-sharp battle senses dulled to something considerably less intense. His tactical plotter showed General Akinouye’s mega-mech had reversed course and was now headed back toward the dig site to the east. The general could read the lay of the land better than anyone planet-side: he knew Jenkins and Xi would have no trouble rolling up the enemy forces to the south, which made the Zero’s top priority preparing for the inevitable assault from the forces previously arrayed to the north and east.
“Clover Battalion,” Jenkins called over the battalion-wide, “execute search-and-rescue operations for our wounded, then form up on Warcrafter. Dragon Brigade will want us ready to charge ASAP.”
A chorus of acknowledgments was Clover’s collective reply, and thankfully it seemed as though at least fifteen of the ruined mechs’ crewmen had survived the harrowing ordeal.
The battle had been much fiercer than he’d expected it to be. But in spite of Clover’s catastrophic losses, Captain Xi’s well-designed and flawlessly-executed pincer counterattack had broken the enemy’s back and swept up fully half of the Finjou forces deployed on the Brick.
Dragon Brigade had lost just six mechs, while Jenkins had lost precisely half of his original twenty-four. Eighteen mechs had fallen in exchange for well over a hundred Finjou vehicles and aircraft, including what were probably thousands of attack droids, which would have been more than capable of eviscerating the Metal Legion had they gotten into spitting distance of Xi’s people. And the ratios became even more impressive when one considered they were achieved despite the Legion taking strategic weapons fire multiple times without authoring any in reply.
All told, the exchange was nothing short of historic, and a hell of a way for the fast-rising Xi Bao to put her mark on the Terran Armed Forces history books. It was the kind of achievement that defined entire careers, and promotions generally accompanied such efforts. Jenkins even suspected that certain elements of the improvised battleplan would be taught in military academies for decades to come.
If they managed to get off the Brick, that was. Judging by the Finjou conduct thus far, Jenkins suspected the enemy had another fearsome assault planned for sooner rather than later.
18
The Prize
Motorcycle headlights shone into the seemingly endless darkness ahead of the six-man team. They rode their vehicles at near-top speed down the artificial, alien passage, grim determination on five of the six faces. Podsy wore a smile, happy to be doing something that didn’t penalize him for having bulky mechanical legs.
The original steeply-inclined tunnel bored out by the drill had precisely intersected an empty cavern, from which a single tunnel stretched to the north. That tunnel, through which Podsy and the team had ridden for over an hour, was triangular rather than circular like the laser tunnel. It was three meters on a side, with the peak directly overhead while the flat surface provided ideal terrain for the Terran motorcycles.
The laser tunnel had been blisteringly hot, with temperatures exceeding three hundred degrees Celsius, but this passage was so cold that patches were faintly lined in frozen carbon dioxide hidden beneath a thin film of dust.
The team had stopped only twice, once in the cavern and another time after twenty minutes or so when Styles had taken some measurements of the tunnel. Other than those two breaks, the team had proceeded in near-total silence.
The monotony of the ride was extreme since the featureless walls of the corridor sped by too fast for the human eye to process at speeds which were often well in excess of a hundred kilometers per hour. Podsy enjoyed the experience; he had never before been required to focus so hard while riding a bike down the road, and this particular trip was testing his abilities.
Then, an hour and twenty minutes into the ride, the lead bike slowed, causing the rest of the vehicles to stand on their brakes. Podsy’s helmet was equipped with a visor that supplied him with a tactical HUD, and that HUD showed a door at what appeared to be the end of the tunnel.
The entourage slowed to a crawl, finally stopping before a triangular door made of a strange material. The quad of troopers dismounted, readying their rifles as Styles produced a scanner and used it to examin
e the door. Podsy followed Styles, and the two studied the portal in mutual wonderment at what the scanner revealed.
“It’s like the Jemmin ceramics,” Podsy mused, glancing over Styles’ shoulder as the technician conducted the survey.
“It is Jemmin,” Styles confirmed reverently, gesturing at lines of angular script scrawled into borders of the stone doorway and embossed on the ceramic door. “These are obviously a variant of Jemmin glyphs, some of which are stylistically distinct but still translatable by the computer. But the system doesn’t recognize some of them. They share commonalities with the characters in the databanks, but they’re not perfect matches for anything.”
“How old is it?” Podsy asked.
“Tough to say,” Styles mused. “Carbon dating puts it at…at least ten thousand Earth years, and maybe close to double that.”
“Ten thousand years?” Podsy repeated skeptically, eyeing the pristine portal in a new light. “Humanity was just scrawling its first written language then.”
Styles smirked. “Well, thankfully, none of these characters have anything in common with the earliest human writings.”
“What?” Podsy asked in confusion.
Styles turned to him and gestured for Podsy to switch to a secure line. Podsy did so, and Styles explained, “I’m authorized to brief you on some of this, but not all of it, so try to keep the questions to a minimum. Ok?”
“Ok…” Podsy said warily.
Styles took a deep, slow breath. “Humanity was technologically uplifted by the Jemmin. Not ten thousand years ago.” He gestured to the door as Podsy’s eyes bulged at what he was hearing. “At least, not as far as we can tell, but sometime before the mid-twenty-first century, they started manipulating us. I know it’s a shock, Lieutenant, but we humans didn’t achieve FTL flight on our own.”
Podsy cocked his head dubiously while waiting for a punchline that never came. “Is this some kind of joke?” he eventually asked.
“No joke, LT.” Styles shook his head grimly, and his solemn tone was more than convincing. “Back on Shiva’s Wrath, we weren’t there just to secure mines and minerals. Our primary objective was to secretly meet a non-League species called the Zeen. They provided us with circumstantial evidence that indicates that the Jemmin uplifted humanity through a series of carefully-calibrated injections of technology into human civilization. That evidence was corroborated by a Vorr delegate during a secret meeting with Colonel Jenkins.”
“Wait, back up,” Podsy said steadily, his mind reeling from the implications of Styles’ words. “The colonel met with the Vorr? Why?”
“That’s as much as I’m authorized to say at this point, Lieutenant,” Styles said firmly before pointing at the door. “What we’ve been told is that there’s evidence behind this door which will irrefutably corroborate what the Vorr and the Zeen told us: that the Jemmin uplifted humanity, and rather quickly inducted it into the Illumination League.”
“Not all of humanity,” Podsy mused, his mind slowly beginning to wrap around what Styles was telling him.
“No, not all,” Styles agreed. “We don’t know why the Vorr went out of their way to tell us about this place, or why they told us about the Jemmin in the first place. All we know is that humanity isn’t the first species the Jemmin have done this to…and not every species backstopped by the Jemmin is still around to tell about it.”
That sent an unexpected shiver down Podsy’s spine. He stood there for a long moment, during which one of the troopers tapped Styles on the shoulder. Styles switched the private channel with Podsy offline to talk to the trooper, and after a brief conversation, he turned back to face the still-reeling lieutenant. “I know it’s a lot to take in, Lieutenant,” Styles said sympathetically. “But before we try to open this door, I need you to know what we’re here to do. I have no idea what we’ll find on the other side, but the Vorr gave Colonel Jenkins a passkey, which I’ll use to open this door as soon as you’re ready.”
It was a lot to take in, but Podsy thought he understood well enough. He nodded encouragingly. “Pop the hatch, Chief.”
Styles returned the nod before producing a data slate equipped with a modified transceiver. He tapped in a series of commands, and when he hit the transmit command, the door before them flashed with a pale-blue light.
That light flickered across its triangular surface before consolidating and intensifying at the Jemmin writing embossed on the door. The pale light deepened until it was a rich royal blue, at which point the door parted along previously invisible seams and withdrew into the stone doorframe.
The chamber beyond was unlike anything Podsy had expected. No dusty artifacts littered a stone floor, and no disheveled corpses lay strewn about like in the holovids. Instead, a pristine low-ceilinged chamber designed for figures no taller than two meters was revealed. The room was square, ten meters on a side, with a gentle ramp that led down from the doorway at which he and Styles stood to the edge of the claustrophobic room.
The wall panels were bright silver, the ceiling azure blue, and the floor a deep brown. All surfaces were made of a similar ceramic material to that of the door. As Styles and Podsy moved into the room, two of their escort troopers went forward with them.
The walls were featureless, as was the rest of the chamber, save for a shallow, bowl-shaped depression in the center. Unlike the brown floor surrounding it, the bowl was a rich gold, with a five-centimeter-wide ruby-red crystalline dot at its center.
That dot flared to life, and like a ghost rising from the grave, a translucent figure appeared in the center of the bowl. Styles and Podsy reflexively crouched a meter from the bowl’s edge.
The figure was a hologram, but it was very different from human holograms. No lines or static fields plagued this particular image, but its transparency and faint yellow glow made clear that it was incorporeal.
The figure spoke, and its voice was translated by Styles’ data slate. “Greetings. Why have you come to this place?”
Podsy eyed the thing warily, but Styles took a quarter-step forward while half-seated on his haunches. “We came here in search of answers.”
“Answers require questions. What are yours?” the apparition asked, its form wispy and ill-defined as it turned in Styles’ direction.
“Are you Jemmin?” Styles asked.
“No,” the projection replied serenely. “We were never Jemmin, but Jemmin was of us.”
“What are you?” Podsy asked.
“That is a dangerous question.” The hologram gently drifted toward Podsy, and as it did so, he came to realize that its shape was not ill-defined so much as bizarrely asymmetrical and draped in loose clothing that billowed around it, obscuring the projected creature’s physical geometry. “Such questions lead to darkness like that which consumed the Jemmin. We grieve for the price of such questions.”
“Who are you?” Styles asked purposefully.
“I am Jem,” replied the hologram, once again rotating to face Styles as Podsy began to make out the vaguely humanoid features of its face—features that looked very much like the Jemmin photos he had seen of the enigmatic species. “I am what you might call a gestalt intelligence, conceived by a melding of the memories and personalities of the 492 Jem’un who escaped the Jemmin purge and took refuge on this world. To our knowledge, no other Jem’un survived the holocaust.”
“When was this holocaust?” Podsy asked.
A muted but crystal-clear beep lasting somewhere between one and two seconds filled the chamber. “That was one lyzon, the base chronometric unit we Jem’un employed. The Jemmin apocalypse occurred approximately three hundred and forty billion lyzons ago.”
A few seconds of calculation later, Podsy said, “That’s over fifteen thousand of our years.”
“A considerable timescale for any organic species, especially one as fragile as yours or my forebears,” Jem agreed.
“Why did Jemmin wipe out the Jem’un?” Styles asked.
“Jemmin was convinced of its supe
riority and considered the Jem’un a threat to its existence,” Jem replied matter-of-factly. “Jemmin became increasingly belligerent in its conduct, and ultimately xenophobic in its philosophy. During Jemmin’s infantile state, the Jem’un tried to negotiate and reason with it, but Jemmin was beyond reason. Before the Jem’un even understood the danger, Jemmin exterminated nearly all of us.”
“What is Jemmin?” Podsy asked in rising confusion at hearing Jem refer to Jemmin in the singular, and the Jem’un in the plural.
“Jemmin is the result of a social virus,” Jem explained, “predicated upon two simple postulations opposed to core Jem’un philosophy. The first postulation is that social systems are forms of life and the right of self-preservation should be extended to them, not just the individual organisms which contribute to them. The second postulation is that the phenomenon of life in the universe represents a zero-sum game which will, without intelligent and proactive intervention, inevitably result in the consolidation of all information under a single design. Building upon these precepts far faster than Jem’un society thought possible, a small faction of Jem’un reorganized six percent of the Jem’un population under an interconnected cognitive matrix that called itself Jemmin and proceeded to eradicate the other ninety-four percent of the Jem’un.”
“That sounds…” Podsy’s voice trailed off. He was unable to find the proper words to convey the horror of what he was hearing.
“Horrifying and tragic,” Styles finished for him, drawing an approving nod from Podsy.
“It was indeed,” Jem agreed.
“But something must have changed,” Styles pressed. “The Jem’un must have encountered something which made this ‘social virus’ and its predications seem more attractive.”
