End Game - A PlanetSide 2 Short Story

[Shiaari]

For all its material advantages the sedentary life has left us edgy; unfulfilled. Even after four hundred generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.

~Carl Sagan.

End Game
Where had we come from? Why had we left? What had we set out to accomplish? Who had we left behind? When the war began we forgot these things. As it dragged on we forgot more. Who we were, our lives; we even abandoned our names for monikers like 50percentgenius, KittensAkimbo, and Hehehehe. Oh, we tried to remember in our own way. The Terrans insisted they knew what it meant to be human, and the New Conglomerate’s answer was, is, and shall always be: Freedom; and they will die, and die, and die some more, die over, and over; wake up in the morning, die before lunch, die after dinner, die before bed, and wake up the next day, and die getting dressed; dying to be free.

I would die to be free from dying.

In the meantime there is work to do, and things to remember.

The World Atlas 2637, and the San Francisco Travel Guide, both sit on my tiny desk because my great, great, great, great Grandfather refused to leave without having something to remind him of home. According to family legend he was walking down Mission Street when the word came and he ducked into a tiny shop for something, anything. And here they sit, slightly yellowed but no worse for wear after so long. Plastic truly is forever. I remember when they came to me: in a flimsy steel box dug out of the rubble of my childhood home in Shadespire Village.

Back then the very talk of disloyalty got you in front of a firing squad, let alone harboring a traitor. That’s what we were accused of. The sentence was handed down thousands of miles away and delivered from an orbiting gun platform. I was out with the new boy—the, “traitor,”—and running back to the smoldering crater of Shadespire he blubbered something about his parents joining the New Conglomerate, and that he was really, really sorry. I understood he was sorry and felt responsible. I understood that he was completely innocent, and I liked him too. But, no amount of affection and forgiveness could distract me from the haunting memories, or the lament for those memories I don’t have.

Earth. A collection of fading images printed on archival polymer. Are these really humans in these pictures? They look human. They smile and they drink cocktails, and ride cable cars to and fro. They buy innocuous things, like gifts, and books, and sex. Where are their weapons? Why aren’t they wearing body armor? What happens when they die?

Death. It hurts, but it also teaches. Check those corners. Don’t waste time. Don’t sit in one place for too long. Don’t get caught with an empty side-arm. Listen for engines. Don’t linger under overhangs. Be quiet. Look up. Remember your knife. The one in front of you takes a bullet so you can take one more step. And in a flash you’re back where you started to do it all over again. Repetition can teach anything. Humans on Earth must be experts at living. Auraxians are experts at dying.

The boy—now a man—couldn’t reconcile himself with my obsession with Earth and its people, or the time I spent studying radio interferometry. I spent days at a time at the Aurxicom radio observatory, days that he felt should have been spent with him. We had survived, after all, and no one in the Terran high command seemed to care. It was a miracle. We were star crossed lovers. I was merely obsessed with the stars, and he was obsessed with freedom. When the war finally broke out he left me for another woman, and for the brief moment I met her she reminded me of those women in the travel guide: confident, self-assured, independent, and captivatingly beautiful. I smiled at her, bade her take care of him where I could not, but she scowled back at me.

“Don’t you have a fucking clue what’s going on?” She asked, shaking her head at me as if I'd never read a bit of news in my life. Of course I knew. Open rebellion, but what is a revolution to the deep time of the cosmos? What is freedom worth when our true home is out there somewhere still, waiting? She wouldn’t have it. I was an academic and clearly out of touch. And that’s where I spent the opening salvos of this Auraxian War, now into another millennium, behind my radio telescope array looking for home, yearning to stand in San Francisco where my ancestor walked free and found these books.

For a while the war was all you could find on the data nets. Conglomerate blank clashes with Republic blank, over blank, as many as blank dead. Like all things in the universe there was an order to this conflict, and it would end when sufficient blood had been spilled in order to balance the equation. My money was on the Republic. They had all the resources and all the logistics, but the New Conglomerate was an indomitable foe. With men and women like that man I once thought I loved, how could they lose? They could lose through mere attrition. They were outnumbered, and every slain NC rebel was one less body to hold a gun. The TR rarely went on the offensive in those days.

It was just after a particularly bloody battle when the Vanu played their first gambit. Rebirthing technology. The Republic was furious. Scientists from across Auraxis were arrested and charged with treason. Those who wouldn’t cooperate were executed immediately in the very court rooms they were sentenced. Oh, the technology wasn’t new to us, but it had been carefully obscured, and study of it forbidden by the authorities. It wasn’t so much that the Vanu cult released this technology to the entire planet, including the Conglomerate fighters, but they had mastered it. It was like having a cat in a bag, and opening it to discover a tiger.

The equation changed dramatically. That last and final fear holding back the oncoming conflict vanished. New Conglomerate ranks swelled with the angry, disenfranchised, and highly motivated people who hated the Terran Republic and everything it stood for. NC guerilla tactics gave way to full on armored columns advancing on every Terran facility on the planet. It made the Terran’s flinch, and when their response finally came it was sheer, utter, incomprehensible panic. Their government collapsed. Every soul that could carry a cycler was given one, including every administrator, every lawyer, every judge, every magistrate, every cabinet member, advisor, teacher, firefighter, ordinary citizen, and child. The entire TR population—that didn’t join the NC—became a military.

To this day their seat of government remains empty, for there is nothing left to govern that can be shot at. The capital city is a ghost town. The once common administrative messages and requisitions have gone silent. So too have the trials and the executions.

But, the dying goes on.

When the Republic military finally arrived at Auraxicom to press us all into service—their compelling propaganda reinforced by the fact death was no longer a permanent fixture—I had already been contacted by Vanu leaders—backed up by the same compelling propaganda. They had taken an interest in my research, if for nothing else than to deny the Terrans a leading astrophysicist who spearheaded their contact directive.

It was after I joined the Vanu that I made my first real breakthrough. Examining a cluster of stars I discovered a pulsar with a frequency that matched one on the old charts dating back to the initial expedition. Using that pulsar as a guidepost I looked for more pulsars, and determined with absolute certainty that the wormhole dumped our beleaguered civilization much closer to home than we had first thought. We hadn’t left the Milky Way. Earth couldn’t be further away than about a 120,000 light years, and was statistically probably much closer than that. It meant light from Earth’s sun had already reached Auraxis. All I needed to do was look for stars in the same spectral class. Perhaps, if I could get enough signal resolution, I could even catch a spectral whiff of Earth’s atmosphere.

And that was the end of my career.

Heresy, they call it. Those we left behind are nothing like us, and our future is transhuman. When I protested I was reassigned, and my work scrubbed. They are, however, partly correct. After eons of non-stop war, dying countless times, our bodies so heavily modified by alien technology, and reborn in inexorable, infinite transubstantiation, there is no doubt. I have nothing in common with my ancestor except a few latent base pairs. But, I want to know. Vanu teaches us that knowledge is a power unto itself, and who knows how knowing where the homeworld is might empower our civilization? How much stronger would we be if we, not the Terrans, were to restore contact with Earth? I explain this to my superiors, but they see right through my pretense. They know me. They know I want this war to end.

They know I want to go home.

They say this is home, and it is our divine right to conquer it.

No civilization can endure a thousand years of war and not be changed by it, not even the intellectual might of the Vanu Sovereignty, which devotes so much of its immortality to learning, but still too much to death. I cobbled together a sizeable telescope array using a virus to surreptitiously hijack observatories across Auraxis, and continued my search in secretive solitude—when I wasn’t hosing my more primitive relatives with white hot plasma.

And that was ten thousand subjective years ago.

The planet seems to soak up our rage like maize in fertile soil. Auraxis thrives on our perpetual conflict. It gifts our bloody sacrifice with tantalizing new bits. We knew the ancient Vanu were masters of space and time, but we’re still not prepared for just how deep their mastery still goes. Their empire didn’t just spread out across the galaxy, but across time. Auraxis was—is—one of their worlds. They are still here, but not where. When?

We couldn’t have noticed it before, not until I started measuring those pulsars. They are all red shifted. And it’s not just the pulsars. Every nearby stellar object is red shifted at the same rate. This phenomenon should only be observed in very distant galaxies, but even those have the exact same red shift. In the Auraxian sky, every star, every galaxy, everything, even the other moons in the Auraxian system, are either moving away at the exact same speed, or something is dilating the light as it approaches the planet.

It is as if the planet is encased in its own time dilation sphere of several orders of magnitude. Who knows how many years—millions even—have passed since our arrival?

The Vanu protected their civilization by hiding behind walls of time, encasing their planets in spheres of temporal displacement, while they thrive some other time. Are they in the future? Or the past? That doesn’t matter. Yet. What is important is how long Earth has been beaming these signals at us, and when we can expect their ships to arrive.

They’re probably already here, wondering why we haven’t sent anything back. Until today. I’ve calculated the necessary blue shift to have an intelligible signal outside the temporal envelope. My finger hovers over the transmit key, ready to squirt ten thousand years of Auraxian history into deep space carried on half a million giga watts of microwave radiation and fry every superconductor slaved to my program. The atmospheric refraction itself will scramble every computer from here to Esamir.

The Ten Thousand Year Auraxian War ends. Right about… now.

[Shiaari]

Jamylin stabbed viciously at the transmit key while the holographic displays stared back at her. As she tried to grasp mentally what had happened—or better, what had not happened—they went blank leaving her in stunned silence. It wasn't until she rose from her desk reaching for water that she finally saw she was no longer alone.

A lightly armored woman stood at the door, with her helmet tucked under one arm. She wore her jet black hair in an impossible bun that cast doubt on whether or not that helmet was ever worn, but a cursory feed from an implant revealed her rank and combat record: Julia Pritcher, call sign BuddhaBelly. One of Vanu’s best. From the looks of her she took her career very seriously, which meant her taking the time to make herself presentable was a good indicator that this was a little more than a courtesy call. Before she spoke she waved her escorting pair of heavies of indeterminate gender at ease, and when she did her voice was a firm contralto with a tempo that betrayed her as a classically trained orator.

“Do you know why I’m here? Doctor Alrik?”

Julia’s patronizing grated on her nerves. She nearly snapped before composing herself, a queue not lost on Julia.

“Just come out with it, will you? Why insult me?”

Julia’s fixed stare was unphased, but for the subtle simper then curling the corners of her lips. She escalated the false pretense to something blatantly saccharine.

“Now, Doctor, there’s no need for false bravado. Do you know why I’m here?”

It was obvious the only way forward was to play along.

“No, Julia, I don’t know why you’re here. Would you care to share with us?”

Julia shrugged off Jamilyn’s mocking and placed a syringe on the table as she sat down in the adjacent chair. Jamylin fixed her eyes on that needle and its clear contents. It was certainly new, but unnecessary. “Why the hypo? Wouldn't a bullet work? I'm sure you could have someone waiting at the spawn tube to kill me again. And again.”

“The thought crossed my mind,” she said, the words slithering between her teeth before being bitten off. “Are you familiar with how rebirthing technology works?”

“After eight thousand years outside the classroom this is what you came for? A science lesson?”

“Humor us.”

“It starts with a nanite infusion that takes a read on the genomic quantum state of the subject. It takes about an hour. The nanites bond into a secondary neural network in the subject's body, and that quantum state becomes entangled with the rebirth matrix, which mirrors the genomic quantum state in real time. Every time they die the rebirth matrix reloads the genomic quantum state from the instant of death, creating a precise clone of the subject, memories, awareness, and continuity of consciousness intact. A fine mixture of quantum mechanics and genetic engineering.”

Julia smiled at the professor before motioning over to the syringe. “And what should happen if the process were interrupted? Perhaps, if the artificial neural network of nanites in your body were disrupted in such a way that the entanglement were interfered with?”

For a full minute the implication lingered in the air. How long had they been in possession of this technology? Julia continued.

“Professor Jamilyn Alrik, you have been found guilty of high treason against the Will of Vanu,” and sliding the page across the desk, “This is the warrant for your execution, and the hypo contains nanites designed to attack and disable those already in your body. This will effectively remove you from the rebirthing matrix. Once the process is complete they will break down in your bloodstream releasing a fatal neurotoxin. You will die. Permanently. And, dare I say it, far less painfully than you already have. That being said, you already know the increasingly creative alternative.” She relished the last sentence with obvious slowness.

“You expect me to commit suicide!?”

“That is exactly what we expect.”

“For the propaganda?”

“What else? What a story it will be. The triumph of Vanu over the petty schemes of a disillusioned scientist turned traitor. And that’s the really good part. It will be true.”

She considered pointing out how surely someone would notice her spawning over and over, and each time being hauled away by guards, but it would be absurdly easy to redirect her rebirth signal to a private location. Julia could see these conclusions ripple over her brow and she smiled manipulatively.

“Yes, we’ve considered everything. Now, be a good girl and take your medicine.”

Just as Jamilyn was about to refuse, she heard the heavy footsteps and electromuscular whine of a MAX come through the door—Just barely. In her hyperawareness she’d never taken the time to notice the shimmering hot air escaping from its back mounted heat sink fins, or the way its foot plates lifted and parted automatically around the ankles as the soldier inside took each step. It was carrying a pair of Nebula cannons that it quickly disposed of, tossing them to the ground. Its posture changed then, revealing the very human swagger that controlled it. It lurched menacingly over her.

There was no warning or option. The MAX reached down with mechanically assisted swiftness and took her by the neck. When she finally registered the moment she couldn’t breathe, she also noted her feet were no longer touching the floor. This was something new. She’d been burned, blown to pieces, shot in every corner of her body, crushed in debris, smashed in the air, stabbed, but being strangled was something altogether new. She wasn’t ready for it, and futile panic set in. She tried kicking at the suit—as if that would do anything—but it kept her at a full arm’s length, and all she kicked was air. It was, of course, the same air she was now starving for when the shakes took hold of her. As she succumbed to asphyxia she heard Julia’s contralto trailing off into the abyss.

“Just so you know … I’m … not … bluffing."

[Shiaari]

From the observation deck Julia Pritcher could see the all too familiar tell tales of impending battle. The stray tracers and explosive flashes occurred ever nearer, along with the occasional column of black smoke, each one closer than the one before. The squads allocated to her by the Conclave were—as predicted—being forced back by elite New Conglomerate fighters of superior skill and equipment. To the untrained it would appear to be a hopeless situation, but this was Auraxis, and this war’s ebb and flow a force unto itself.

She knew the NC commanders themselves saw what was coming when they arrived at the Amp Station. She knew they could easily see their assault slowing down and being tied up in crossfire. It would grind to a halt at the shield generators, and in that instant the hammer would fall. The script always took the same form, though with subtle deviations.

The key to victory was in those subtle deviations.

Scheduled reinforcements consisted of a Magrider squadron of six vehicles that were already enroute, and their arrival would be timed with that of Galaxy dropships carrying a balanced cross section of troop classes and their requisite support. The hammer would come from orbit. Elite light assault shock troops and support waiting for an active beacon behind the enemy axis of advance. The very sight of the drop pods falling from the sky should force an NC contraction out of mere reflex. If the ferocity of the counter-attack was sufficient to deny them their AMS support they should then rout and regroup at their lattice of origin. Combined Vanu forces—under Conclave command—would then advance seizing initiative from the New Conglomerate.

Subtle deviations.

In planning several options were considered. The Conclave buckled under the addition of new leadership, versus the existing command structure, with junior members vetting their own untested ideas to repel an attack that all three empires had repelled in one fashion or another repeatedly for the past ten thousand years. The variables were well understood. Thus, Julia handily dismissed these options as unsuitable or otherwise inadequate based on her generally underappreciated experience. Plainly put, dropping in mobile light infantry was her proposal.

Presently she stood fuming on the observation deck, spurned by her superiors in the classic struggle of middle management. She wasn’t low enough in rank to be taken in as a privileged protégé, but not high enough to have any substantive authority. Ergo, it fell upon her to run this gristmill while a higher-ranking member of the Conclave commandeered the assault—her assault.

Dealing with that astrophysicist partly made up for it. But only partly. It would depend on how many times she’d need to be killed before finally taking the injection. Inventing new ways to kill an Auraxian could become tiresome in the extreme, but it did present a new challenge wholly unlike the rigors of this perpetual war.

Subtle deviations.

It came to her then, those could be the key to everything: War, death, and life, all driven by subtle deviations. There was something there, she thought, something now missing from the collective Auraxian consciousness, something on the verge of her own. If only she could reach out for it. Just then a brilliant muzzle flash interrupted her train of thought. A Vanguard main battle tank had crested a nearby hill, and that meant her forces had finally—and literally—been pushed against the wall. The battle had arrived.

“MAXes to the towers,” she could hear herself saying, her trained voice steady and just loud enough to fill the space. “Let their fire bisect the center fortification on the East wall. That’ll be the generator nearest their assault. Engineers on the North guns.” After each command there was a brief pause as her orders were confirmed. She was patient and taciturn in her battle language. No frills. “Delta squad is tasked with maintaining generator integrity. Let Bravo squad take up flanking positions along the battlement. Charley squad should stay flexible and prepared to shift classes. We want to keep them from setting up AMS along that wall. Alpha squad has point and should be the first to advance.”

She had then become the eye of a hurricane around which spun the well-practiced protocol of the Vanu command apparatus. Her command retinue of junior officers relayed her commands to the squad commanders out on the battlements and in the courtyard. In turn they relayed battle data back to her staff, who handled all command requests on her behalf based on her singular directive. This is what ten thousand years of war had wrought, a command structure that can very much run itself. Even if she were to be called away abruptly to oversee another campaign, these officers would have everything they needed to carry out her directive with absolute certainty.

She stood in martial repose, firmly planted literally and figuratively in her mission and resolve. No one questioned her. Not here. Not in battle. The other Paragons might prattle and plot. They might even steal her ideas and her glory. But, here in this room she was God.

And what of that scientist? Where was she now? Ah, yes, in stasis. It’s not possible to prevent the transmission of a rebirth signal once the subject is dead, but the Vanu Sovereignty had discovered it quite possible to intercept the signal and route it in circles for a time. But, that wasn’t good enough. She had to die for her heresy, the very same heresy that had brought her to their attention in the first place. The notion that Earth held the secret of Auraxian survival went against everything Vanu doctrine stood for, but at the time denying the Republic a very competent scientist was more important. Perhaps just killing her outright would have been best, but she did have her uses. The central thrust of her thesis—that the ancient Vanu was a temporal civilization—had yielded many avenues of research, including the neural disruptor serum and rebirth signal back tracing, for both of which she was playing guinea pig. Taken altogether this one scientist had advanced the Vanu cause more than ten thousand years of constant war, and that fact was what really chapped Julia’s ass. Once these technologies were weaponized it really would be the end of the war, Earth or no Earth. Jamilyn be damned! Just who did she think she was? What was there on Earth, but primitive human looking apes sharing most in common with these filthy New Conglomerate mongrels?

Outside the battle progressed normally. All the expected trappings of the innumerable battles of Auraxis were present. The steady staccato of bursters and flak, the constant cycling whine of plasma based energy weapons, the occasional deep booms of exploding vehicles and C4, and the stunted chatter of Vanu battle language filling the local q-net. She was reaching for her carbine when that chatter reached a fever pitch.

“Gate diffuser! Gate diffuser!” Screamed a voice she recognized as Bravo squad commander, a squat but sturdy fellow who went by Pickles. From his vantage point no doubt he spotted the characteristic line of Sunderers bearing down on the shield gate. She called for an immediate scramble of vehicles from the internal platforms, but she knew it was futile. There was no one at the terminals, and before she could hop down there herself she saw the first Sunderer barrel through the gate on its way to the internal shields. It was moving fast along with two others right on its heels, their guns ablaze.

Subtle deviations.

A deafening explosion that rattled her very bones briefly interrupted the noise of approaching engines. Mines. She had ordered both entrances to be mined, and as the lead vehicle disintegrated into shrapnel the remaining two barricaded through the flaming hulk. Before they were even through the smoldering debris the doors were opened and out scrambled a posse of grim faced blue and yellow ass kickers. The disorganized members of her own force that chased them through the gate were cut down with depressing ease. The next moment they were at the node and the clock was ticking.

It was only seconds before the observation deck’s hatch was blown open and the NC commander hauled his masculine bulk through the smoke. Her command retinue was gunned down immediately, leaving her standing alone, arms folded defiantly over her chest. It was an extremely unflattering situation to be caught in: an Auraxian separated from their weapon, wearing virtually no hardened body armor. Despite the abject superiority of Vanu nanoweave, how it afforded maximum mobility and maximum coverage, it did—by virtue of its design—cling utterly tight to the skin. It had come to be pejoratively synonymous with an ancient textile called Spandex because it left little to the imagination.

She flung her hair clear of her eyes to get a better look at him after he took off his helmet. Each step of his approach was swung wide with that cocky swagger NC soldiers were known for. He wasn’t much taller than she was, and he was obviously well built. Every male Auraxian was, of course, but she rarely ever got to sincerely look at any human being who hadn’t sworn to the Vanu aegis. Consciously she knew every Auraxian was human, but to see this man standing here, his Mag cutter poised between them, was a reminder of just how human he was. Even more startling was that she found herself attracted to him.

“Hoss!” Another NC infantryman called up through the hatch. “Second platoon’s got a hornet’s nest of Magriders burnin’ everything alive. Their AMS and backups are down, and there’s a wing of hostile Galaxies headed this way.” The fresh-faced lieutenant paused. It wasn’t good. “And there’s a squad of purple ball busters hittin’ the ground behind us!”

“Get the mines cleaned up and replace them with our own. Get the engies on anti-personnel turrets. Tell’em to cover the shaft leading up to the aircraft terminals. MAXes on the stairs” His orders understood he then turned his attention back to her.

“Vanu women are the only women left who care about their appearance, you know? Everybody else just thinks it’s some purple fairy fart bullshit, but I do appreciate the way you look, BuddhaBelly. Or should I call you Julia?”

Such humiliation. Behind her eyes hatred burned white hot. Just as soon as he killed her she could respawn and demonstrate the finer qualities of that “fairy fart bullshit.” But, he was obviously enjoying himself, and the humiliation physically hurt. She became aware then that neither herself nor “Hoss” had looked away from each other.

“So, why do they call you BuddhaBelly, anyway?” He asked, kicking aside a dissolving body to sit at one of the stations. Their holos had already been wiped.

“I was pregnant when we began using rebirthing technology. I’m a mother.”

“You don’t look pregnant to me.”

“I was, in fact, pregnant for five hundred years before we learned how to poll the rebirthing matrix for new data, allowing me to finally give birth. You killed my son.” She nodded to the body he moved, now almost completely dissolved.

“Damn, I am really sorry about that!” He laughed. “You Vanu are too goddamn smart for your own good, you know?”

“I fail to see how it’s possible to be too smart, Hoss.”

“It can be a real problem when you think everyone else around you is stupid. Take that sundy for example. One guy in it. Who the hell doesn’t expect mines at an amp station? And while we’re talking about stupidity, who exactly doesn’t expect a gate crash anymore?”

He was obviously very proud of his maneuver; even if he did ignore the fact the mines themselves did indicate anticipation of a gate crash. Just then a deep shadow loomed over the observation deck. The rumble of dropship engines presaged footsteps on the roof.

“You’ve provided excellent training for my platoon, Commander Hoss.”

He rose from the seat and gave her one last thorough up-and-down with his eyes, shook his head, and in one motion plunged his Mag cutter deep into her gut. It was a familiar sensation that she submitted to, falling into his arms, and then to the floor. When she woke up in the spawn room she could see the Galaxies hovering overhead, and feel the battle raging to take back the control node.

It was going to be a bloodbath.

[Shiaari]

Every myth, every great tale, has its super soldier. The Ancients called them Spartans, Aryans, Berserkers, Fremen. It is the myth of the implacable foe; unyielding; loyal to a fault; bred to be victorious; to believe in the victory. Such tales precede the armies of civilization and prepare the minds of the conquered for their arrival. So, I say to you: be thus prepared. I've met them, the finest warriors in the galaxy, and they call themselves Auraxians.

From Lectures on The Auraxian Crisis, Professor Argyle Crawley, 34565 Galactic Core Standard

***

"We’ve spent ten thousand years with the Conglomerate knife at our throats. I can see that knife; understand it. But I can’t see this one, and that’s what has me on edge.”

“Is this a credible threat? You’ve brought us no evidence. We don’t act on speculation.”

“I don’t ask you to act on mere speculation. Trust your instincts!”

“You mean your instincts, those same instincts that tell you the Vanu have weaponized the rebirthing technology. The same instincts that that tell you they are preparing to wipe us all out along with the New Conglomerate? At the same time? Do you know how preposterous that sounds?”

“Damn you! You were my finest student. Think about the game."

“Yes, focus on the pieces standing still and there’s your play. You taught me that. But what does chess have anything to do with the war? The Sovereignty is in full mobilization and they have been for centuries. There are no pieces not moving.”

“And there you have it! That’s the problem! Has the New Conglomerate mobilized its reserves? Have we? No, we haven’t. They haven’t. Why would the Vanu fully mobilize against a stalemate? Why would they move every piece on the board? Either they are strategically challenged, or? Come on. Think!”

“Or…they don’t really have every piece on the board.”

“Still my finest student.”

***

“Addressing all points of order. There is a motion on the floor to recognize an emergency hearing from the IntelCom subcommittee on Vanu Affairs. Yays? Nays? The motion carries. The Directorship recognizes the IntelCom Undersecretary.”

“I shall get right to the point. Last week our forces engaged a Vanu amp station defended by the Conclave. While it’s not the first time we’ve confronted the Vanu high command so directly, this engagement stands out as one of the fewer times we’ve had electronic surveillance directed at a Conclave hub for any substantive length of time—“

“I don’t comprehend the emergency, Undersecretary. We know precisely what signals go in and out of a Conclave hub. The same kinds of signals that go in and out of our own. Rebirth signals. They’re damn common.”

“Indeed, some more common than others.”

“An insult?”

“The truth. Yes, we have in the past intercepted thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of rebirth signals. Certainly no great feat; if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, right? Wrong. Each signal is in fact a quantum state describing the deceased for the rebirth matrix. Ergo, each rebirth signal is in fact utterly unique. Never to be repeated. May I therefore draw your attention to this signal log. Knowing that each of these transmissions are unique, each one corresponding with the death of a Vanu soldier, how could it be that we intercepted this individual signal—the exact same signal—fifty eight times?”

“Order! The Directorship will have order!”

***

Jamylin awoke to the familiar crackle of a spawn tube powering down. Bleary eyed, weak, and with the mother of all headaches she stumbled onto the deck. She was in a fairly large cell. Twenty some odd meters long by the looks of it, and maybe fifteen wide. The only thing she was sure about was that it wasn’t a standard spawn room. In fact, all it was was a room. No doors. No equipment terminal of any kind. One glowing bar of light in the ceiling. The walls and floor were flat and mirror smooth, the surface being a self-polishing metamaterial. Nanites. And it was cold. Unbearably cold.

It was as if she was—shit. Naked.

As her eyes adjusted she was able to confirm this fact, her naked reflection staring back at her into infinity from four walls. The reflective efficiency of the metamaterial had to have approached ninety nine percent, because she could see herself for what seemed like kilometers before the false image finally went to black. From the floor her reflection was perfect. She left no discernable foot prints, and she could see every part of herself from just about every angle. This left the ceiling an equally perfect matte finish: light diffused from it at precisely forty-five degrees. It looked like perfect Esamiri snow. It was the same kind of reflective or matte material found on the trim of some Magriders, now in the prototyping phase to replace existing spawn shields. Vanu physicists were all show offs. She knew them all by name.

“It’s not really that cold, you know.” Julia’s voice seemed to come from everywhere.

“Is this it? After all of that? Is this really it? A cold room?”

“Do you know what day it is?”

“Does time even matter in this place?”

“Always so difficult,” Julia muttered to herself. “All you had to do was keep studying the time dilation and provide us with an accurate enough coefficient. But no, you had to go rogue and listen for that… planet.”

“Earth? And wait, coefficient?” Jamylin was perplexed. She had discovered a temporal displacement encompassing the entirety of Auraxis, and used it to adjust the frequencies of incoming radio emissions. She’d discovered that Auraxis orbited just outside the radiation belt of the Jovian world holding it in its thrall, ensuring the moon was bathed in just enough energy to make life feasible. The initial expedition didn’t bother investigating it when they discovered Auraxis harbored life in the first place. So, owing to the fact the Vanu Sovereignty declared her discoveries heresy she became, in effect, Auraxis’ sole radio-astronomer.

Jamylin continued aloud.

“They wanted to make planetfall as swiftly as possible, and by then it was too late. The temporal displacement completely obscured those radio waves, stretching them so flat they were squelched by the cosmic microwave background. In effect, it was invisible. And then the war started. No one really cared. And so, no one noticed when were probed by a powerful beam of radar, and no one noticed when it became awash in modulated frequencies. Julia, Earth knows we’re here! We can go home!”

From where ever she was speaking Julia was silent. And it seemed to be getting colder. By now her fingers and toes were beginning to hurt. Soon they’d go numb. Finally, after an hour—or five minutes—Julia spoke again.

“It’s not that cold in here, you know?”

“What are you talking about? It’s freezing… damnit Julia pull your head out of your ass!”

“Freezing? You think it’s freezing? Ms. Alrik, it’s barely below thirteen degrees. It may help if I explain what is happening to you, since your area of expertise isn’t human physiology. It doesn’t require a great drop in temperature to cause your body to take heat saving measures. One of them being thermal induced vasoconstriction. Under normal circumstances you’d begin to go numb, and only become aware of it when warming back up, but I’m sure you’re feeling it by now. Intense vasoconstriction is quite painful, and for you there is no relief. We’ve taken steps to ensure every part of you stays just warm enough to feel it.

“That is—at least—what I’m ordered to tell you. Duty requires degrees of indifference toward subordinates like yourself, but for that I’ve failed. I loathe you, Doctor Jamylin Alrik. Did you know I sequenced your genome while you were in stasis? And do you know what I found? You’re defective. But I didn’t need to sift through your DNA to figure that out. Aside the fact you have two sets of chromosomes that are suspiciously alike—your behavior says it all. Vanu will decide when and how this war ends, not a backwater inbred defect like you!!”

Just then there was a blur, and before Jamylin’s brain could finish processing Stalker and route that information to the rest of her body, it was interrupted by a brutal uppercut to her still chattering jaw. She didn’t notice the blow leaving Julia decloaked because she was too busy handling reflexes from her throat. Yes, those were pieces of her teeth she had accidentally swallowed, and no sooner had she figured this out her legs were swept from beneath her. Hauling herself up to her feet Julia was nowhere to be seen. The only evidence of her having been there were Jamylin’s blood soaked breasts, and the dripping puddle of it beneath her.

Defect or not, a Vanu scientist is still an Auraxian, a product of ten thousand years of non-stop war. So, when Julia let her next blow fly she was ready for it. This time it was a level right hook, which meant Julia’s cloak disengaged just in time for her to roll with it. The glancing blow left Julia over extended, and provided Jamylin with an opening long enough to seize the slippery Stalker in a grapple, and bury her knee into her liver.

“Auraxians do not practice any florid or precise martial arts. They share more in common with functional military self-defense strategies such as ancient special forces combatives and Old Krav Maga—just finely tuned—for ten millennia. It reflects the rapid transition from empty weapons to knives, and then to fists as close quarters combat quickly devolves into a body breaking melee. It is wholly uncommon for us to enter such combat scenarios willfully. Dispatching the enemy at range with a rifle—or from orbit—is far more preferable to the overt brutality of hand-to-hand combat. But, Auraxians don’t think like we do, and in certain rare situations outside their well-honed tactical efficiencies seem to intentionally seek the most brutal forms of war. Nowhere is this seeming preference for brutality more evident than a confrontation between just two Auraxian females.”

There is no way to properly describe the way Julia leaned into the blow, pushing Jamylin off her feet, or how she slammed her shoulder into Jamylin’s neck, or the repeated retaliatory blows to the face and neck she sustained as Jamylin fought from her back. Between them no rules of war or honor were recognized. Jamylin wasn’t above taking hold of a fistful of Julia’s hair and wrenching her away, and Julia wasn’t so sensitive to give in to the pain of it being torn from her scalp, or busting her knuckles open as she missed the scientist’s face and plowed her fist into the meta-reflective floor. Nor did pain keep Jamylin from biting at Julia’s neck with shattered teeth barely clinging to the gums. They didn’t roll very far, or maneuver much, or take much heed to self-inflicted damage. No effort at defense was made. No protecting the face, no dodging; each move was to strike the other.

Contrary to the precision and speed of Auraxian warfare, on display between them was complete disregard for combat efficiency. It was a personal hatred driving them to murderous thresholds of rage, and the only hope of stopping it was the introduction of another belligerent. Which is to say, on Auraxis, a personal fight between two people is almost always interrupted by something else. A shell, a sniper, another soldier behind, a soldier below, a grenade, death and respawn. But not here. Not in this place. The death of one is punctuated by the primal shriek of the other, answered by the respawning foe flying from the spawn tube in an uninterrupted orgy of wasted pain.

While the air filled with the pungent aerosol of blood, the floor rejected it completely. It pooled in defined beads where ever it landed, splashed on the walls and snaked down without leaving a trace. They murdered one another faster than the nanites in their blood streams could dissolve their corpses that littered the room, hopelessly disfigured and mutilated beyond anything but the most abstract means of identification. It may be tempting to describe them as somehow less than human, perhaps, likening them to animals, but even animals recognize when the fight should end. Make no mistake, there is no level of destruction beyond human reckoning so long as death itself is no longer an option.

And it was that realization that finally broke Jamylin Alrik.

“Stop!” At least, she tried to say stop. It came out more like, “Dhob!”

In this insensate defile of Roman scale, anything halfway resembling coherent speech is a surprise. It wasn’t lost on Julia. She paused across from Jamylin, backing off and stumbling over a previously living version of herself.

“What?”

“Stop... please… I’ll take it.”

It had never occurred to Julia that lurking inside the warrior turned scientist turned gladiator was a pacifist. In fact she was rather alarmed by it, and stepped forward to take Jamylin by the arm just to make sure, landing a pair of completely unmitigated punches squarely to her nose. The resulting brain hemorrhage filled Jamylin’s eyes with a red haze before she collapsed. Ten seconds later she stepped out of the spawn tube and fell to her knees.

As the prototype nanite shield around the pair dissolved from the floor up, she watched through tear soaked eyes that lent such an ethereal quality to it that—for a moment—left her breathless. To the Vanu, technology is not merely might, it is a divine, beautiful, living thing to be loved and worshiped in the most literal sense of the words. Mentally broken at last, it was on that divinity Jamylin relied upon to process the following events. So, when I tell you she accepted from the arriving guards that vial of neural disruptor serum like a lifelong parishioner might receive the Eucharist and cradled it in her arms, lifting it high like a Holy Relic, and that her face had taken on such bliss and contentment one might find in the comfort of a mother’s embrace, you might have an inkling as to why then she smiled beatifically as she loaded it into a pneumatic hypo, put the tip to her neck, and eased her thumb upon the actuator.

To onlookers she took Julia in a grateful embrace, giggled, fell to the floor mumbling like the Oracle at Delphi, and died. Permanently. And yet, as far as Jamylin could tell, the darkness and numbness of death was—disappointingly—incomplete.