Ekological Chimera
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Chapter 33 - Interlude IV: Onwards
🕑 Added 2024-10-01 18:04:28 +0000 UTCSerana was having a great time. The experience of seeing Eigos from the outside was truly magical.
Poor Edward had died some time ago, but she didn’t actually need him. The pendants were, first and foremost, conduits. Since she couldn’t exactly split her mind thirty ways, she just pushed Eternity’s power through when the chosen knights asked for it, but that was hardly the only possibility.
Moving a dead body telekinetically through it was well within her means, if slightly grotesque. Seeing, well, that was much more tricky, though not impossible.
She raised Edward’s remaining hand and saw it slowly frosting over. The Custodian made as if to grab the orb hanging in the black sky.
‘Agnu,’ she thought. The blue giant was recognizable, though the side she was looking at was currently facing away from Eigos, the moon itself invisible.
‘What a spectacle.’
The starship on which she stood wasn’t anything to scoff at either, if for entirely different reasons.
It was not pretty as far as Serana was concerned, but impressive nonetheless. A single one of these ships might represent more metal than half her army. A mind-boggling amount.
And the Terrans had twelve, down two from the previous fourteen. That was just this type of ship too. Serana could see over fifty smaller vessels of two types and another, much bigger one, though that one was far away. At least she thought so. The darkness of space messed with her understanding of distance a lot.
The Custodian wondered how many she could destroy before burning out her conduit.
She’d have to let the other pendant escape before then, though. It’d be quite a waste if both were lost here. Why her former teacher was following her outside the starship after running away so aptly was a mystery, however. Serana had moved Edward’s body a rather large distance from the breach, so they’d probably miss her unless they really were searching for her puppet.
She continued moving and examining the starship, not that she learned much from it. It was unfortunate, but even being present on one of their ships didn’t let Serana glean any insights, except to reinforce the notion that the technology was ridiculously out of her people's grasp.
Having nothing to do but wait, the Custodian focused back on her real body and on the reports in front of her. The war was going according to plan. Most of her forces in the south had either retreated or died, but both Faras and Accad were deprived of most of their harvest and food stockpiles. Kerania fared better, but not by a lot.
She expected a great number of people to starve to death, but it wouldn’t affect the war too much, unfortunately. All three of the rebel kingdoms were little more than annoyances. The real threat was in the sky, but it should drive a wedge between them.
How useful that would be, only Eternity knew, but any advantage was worth pursuing. They might need it when the aliens inevitably retaliated after today.
It took over half an hour, but eventually, Serana felt the pendant fly away in a shuttle.
‘Let’s see how many I can get.’
Admiral Renard sat in his chair on Bastion’s bridge in a foul mood. Just when they were supposed to finally get some answers, their prisoner just got up and left!
“How fucking incompetent do you have to be,” he mumbled.
The messages from Cerberos weren’t really coherent, so Renard didn’t even know how this whole debacle happened.
He was just about to try and badger Captain Mira again, when Lieutenant Ivanova piped up, “We’ve just lost contact with the battlecruiser Hydra.”
“What? Comm issues?” Renard asked, frowning.
Before Ivanova could respond, her eyes widened, “Battlecruiser Pixie is reporting a hull breach! And three corvettes just disappeared!”
“Battlestations!” Renard shouted.
His people scrambled to figure out what was happening as the Admiral himself watched with a grim look on his face. They lost five more corvettes and three destroyers before they finally realised what was happening.
“It’s Cerberos, sir! Something is shooting at us from its hull!” Someone shouted on the bridge.
“What are you waiting for, then?! FIRE!” The Admiral shouted.
The bridge fell silent.
“I said fire! How many other ships must we lose!”
Finally, Bastion’s railguns started unloading their lethal payload while Ivanova distributed his orders to the rest of the fleet. Soon after, other ships joined in, but it took much too long to bring Cerberos down.
The total casualty count amounted to four battlecruisers, including Cerberos, five destroyers, and eighteen corvettes. A bit less than a fourth of the entire task force and thousands of lives.
One thing was certain in Renard’s mind. They’d never succeed with their current strategy.
A paradigm shift was needed.
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Colonel Ashwood stood on a grassy plain somewhere in Kerania, staring at the empty sky.
Once the shooting had started he had ordered the pilot to book it for the planet. The pilot, thankfully, complied. If the reports were accurate, then the fleet took quite the beating.
All because they took aboard some random schmuck. At least it proved that hiding behind the gas giant was likely safe if they didn’t repeat their actions. He doubted the Custodian would have refrained from taking potshots otherwise.
The whole debacle had another, more sinister implication. The Custodian had been sandbagging. Their proxy war approach was mostly pointless as the moment they got within her sight, they’d be vaporized, no matter the number of sword-wielding hordes on their side.
Jane walked to his side from the shuttle, “Is it a bad time to tell you that I pocketed a strange pendant from the dead miracle knight?”
Ashwood blinked, “The one on Cerberus didn’t have anything like that.”
“No, but his stomach had been glowing.”
The Colonel paled, “If it’s connected to whatever bullshit the Custodian does, then it might as well be a ticking time bomb.”
Jane shrugged, “It’s a piece of jewelry. I doubt it’d just explode on its own.”
“A remotely detonated bomb isn’t any better, Lieutenant,” Ashwood retorted.
“Athena will want it.”
Ashwood reflexively looked towards the shuttle, but the pilot hadn’t come out.
“Probably. How do you propose we do anything about that though?” He responded.
“Even if she could reverse engineer this with a glance, I doubt the war will go on for long enough that it’d matter. Hiding it on the planet should be good enough,” Jane said.
The Colonel thought about it for a few seconds, “I suppose that’ll work. Any ideas as to where?”
Jane shrugged again, “Here is as good as any. See that tree over there?” She pointed a few hundred meters away to a lone tree, “I’ll carve a smiley face into it and bury it under.”
He resisted the urge to ask why a smiley face of all things, nodding impassively instead, “I’ll make note of the coordinates.”
As the cyborg left, Ashwood did exactly that, while his thoughts strayed.
Here he was, burying treasure on an alien planet.
Perhaps, hundreds of years from now, someone will find the tree and the necklace, concluding that the people of this era marked their treasures with smiley faces. That was probably why Jane did it. Or to try and get a rise out of him.
The latter was more likely, but Ashwood liked the former explanation more.
His silly thoughts were interrupted by the pilot’s shout, “They are moving, sir!”
After throwing a glance at Jane, who was busy carving into the tree, Ashwood quickly made his way into the shuttle and behind the pilot, “Who is moving?”
“The fleet, sir! They’ve left the shadow of the gas giant, at a fast pace too. They’ll reach orbit in a few minutes.”
The Colonel massaged his temples, unsure what to think of this. He could guess at Renard’s thoughts. Whether he merely wanted to retaliate or realized what Ashwood had, the Admiral was gambling it all.
