Ravens of Eternity

211 Blood & Flame, Pt Mia’s heavily armed and armored frigate loomed over the hilly, smoldering settlement. Dark grey smoke billowed up from beneath. It flowed around the frigate itself and covered its armored undercarriage with thick black soot.

The settlement itself was blackened and charred, consumed by a once-vast fire. Its defenses had been utterly annihilated, its core pierced, and the hidden base shattered. And in the midst of it all – the burnt corpses of dead Hallowed and the ashen wreckages of drones littered the streets.

A dozen Stormrider mecha circled the settlement itself, as though they were on patrol. They were heavily armed and armored, but with highly tuned sensor arrays on their shoulder mounts. Some cruised through the streets while others skated around the perimeter.

And inside of the settlement itself, teams of uniformed Hallowed dug their dead brethren out of the ground dispassionately. While one team pulled their corpses out of the shattered town, another team stacked them up in the center square up top.

There, yet another team tore the cybernetics out of the dead Hallowed, and placed them into separate crates. And though they were highly careful in preserving the cybernetics as much as they could, they had half the care for the body attached to them.

And not a single one of them expressed grief or remorse or anger at their duties. They simply carried on ceaselessly, and mutilated their dead brethren.

Yet another team inside the hill itself pulled apart their many databanks and logic circuits out of their cooling racks. Those too went into crates – but far more carefully than anything else the Prophets touched.

These, they were ordered to treat like gold.

Not only that, but every team that operated in the settlement had at least two Prophets overseeing them. In contrast to their barely-protected Hallowed, they wore thick power armor, and wielded heavy guns.

.....

They hardly did much, other than observe everything that went on around them, an act they all felt was necessary. It was all in service to their order of things.

Every crate found their way to a nearby shuttle, which when full closed itself up and ascended slowly up towards the frigate. It docked itself in its hangar bay above, where it disappeared for some time.

In there, the crates were unloaded and added to the dozens of other crates that were stacked up along the hangar bay walls.

~

While the Prophets cleaned out the settlement, the Spirit of Amelia, Mr Jurassic, and their four mecha stood hidden on the other side of a thick patch of hilly woods over 20 km away.

Every vessel had been powered down except for Amelia, who ran just enough juice to keep her ultra long range sensors and her bridge displays active. As a result, their overall signal was rock-bottom.

Detecting any of their ships would have taken close to a miracle. Or at the very least a deep and narrow scan of their patch of land – unlikely given their distance.

All nine of them were crammed into Amelia’s bridge, and watched the Prophets in action. They sat there for hours and watched as the Prophets and their puppets worked, as their mecha spun in circles all over. As the frigate loomed above.

Most critically, they watched the shuttle travel up and down multiple times throughout the cycle.

“What’s the point of all that?” asked T-Rex. “I mean, it looks like a whole lot of effort for not a whole lot left. I would’ve just cut my losses or something similar. If I was them, anyway.”

“Perhaps they wish to analyze everything,” said Raijin. “I have no doubts they wish to see their logic circuit’s logs. Even if there is no longer anything for them to see.”

“Also to get rid of evidence of their involvement,” added Locke. “If the Federation sends an investigator out here, the last thing they want is to have their fingerprints all over the place.”

“Maybe they’re just recycling parts,” said Freya. “I doubt they could just head into Helios to pick up any spare cutting-edge cybernetics.”

“Or all of the above,” said Azrael.

As they discussed further, Freya observed the mecha as they circled the settlement over and over. But she realized they never went over the same ground more than three times. More than that, she realized that their shoulder-mounted sensor arrays were always pointed at the ground in front of them at the exact same angle.

It dawned on her that they were sweeping the grounds absolutely thoroughly. Three times over, in fact.

Freya turned towards Locke, a quizzical look in her eye.

“They’re also scanning every centimeter of that settlement,” she said. “Are they doing some kinda forensics calculation stuff or something like that?”

Locke leaned in a little closer to the main screen and tried to observe the mecha’s movements as best he could. He watched their patterns intently, and nodded as they performed various movements in succession.

“Seems likely, yeah,” he replied. “Probably building a forensic projection based on how everything’s laid out. For example, the size of that crater versus size of the shell they retrieved... Could have some number crunchers figure out how powerful the guns are, how high up, angle, and so on.”

“If their logic circuits are up to it, they may be able to reverse-engineer the fight in its entirety,” added Raijin. “They can use that data to determine what we’re capable of, and possibly deploy countermeasures.”

“Alright, so they’re figuring out who we are, and what we can do, yeah?” said Azrael. “Makes total sense – gotta study your enemies, you know? Question is, what are we gonna do about it? We can’t just sit here and watch them forever. At some point we’re gonna have to face off against them.”

Freya looked over at her with a wide grin.

“We’re doing the first step,” she said. “We gotta know our enemy, too. All we gotta do next is figure out countermeasures, and then deploy them, right? Like, we could hit them right now and probably cripple ’em.”

“What, so ambush them instead of the other way around?” asked Fluke. “I honestly don’t think that would work out in our favor.”

“Honestly, I don’t think that’s the play here. Even if we could crack them open, all they’d do is send another frigate our way eventually. Or worse. Who knows what sorta armaments these Prophets have.”

Raijin put her fingers up to her chin and thought about their situation deeply. They simply didn’t have enough information. What they needed were access to larger databanks.

“How about this,” she said. “How about we hack into their frigate? We can already defeat their Security Intelligence – all we need is the opportunity to infect their systems. I think doing so would give us a major advantage, no matter what.”

“You’re not proposing you sneak your way onboard that thing, do you?” asked Max. He was utterly incredulous and almost audibly guffawed. Getting near the thing was impossible, much less getting inside it.

Thankfully Raijin shook her head adamantly.

“I would rather not get that close,” she replied. “And I have no need to. None of us do.”

She opened up her personal development circuit and displayed it on her screen. There, they were able to see a landscape of code that she had revealed.

“I have developed my own version of the Prophets’ Security Intelligence,” she said. “Think of it as a patched version of theirs, except with my own subroutines and algorithms to run it. Just like my own drones.”

She patted one of her cottonball bird drones, which chirped happily from the touch.

“I call it the Truesight Engine,” she continued. “And once we inject their ship with it, it will belong to us.”

Freya immediately grinned widely. She was clearly a huge fan of striking them from the inside.

“Alright, I’m down,” she said. “How do we go about doing this injection attack of yours?”

“We simply hit another settlement,” Raijin replied.

~

The settlement filled with Hallowed was sprawling, like the hilly one prior. And this was much more militarized. There were multiple lines of reinforced defenses, each one populated with mecha, turrets, drones, and Hallowed.

Their guns pointed out in every direction, even as constant patrols circled multiple perimeters.

And in the very center of the settlement was a highly fortified compound. Every building had thick armor plating and turrets to protect them. In the compound’s courtyard, a hundred or so Hallowed in heavy armor stood at attention.

A number of snipers patrolled the roofs in the compound, and a handful of missile batteries surrounded a main communications and scanning array.

Every single one of these things looked out towards the horizon, and scanned for anything that came their way.

All were primed and ready for war, and the entire settlement seemed nearly impenetrable.

Unfortunately for them, Mr Jurassic sat high above, beyond the clouds, and beyond the reach of the settlement’s sensors. Just above and to the side was Amelia, who scanned everything below.

And she transmitted everything she saw to the entire team.

With Amelia’s pin-point targeting data, Mr Jurassic’s turrets adjusted themselves down to the micrometre, and fired.

All four guns rained down hell on the settlement below. Their hollow cylindrical shells screamed down like furious balls of lightning, and slammed into the ground with tremendous power. The entire settlement shook as its foundation was repeatedly hammered by the tungsten bolts.

They rained pure destruction, and pounded into everything.

Every defensive structure and building was utterly demolished and torn apart by the unending barrage. Worse, every mecha, drone, turret, and Hallowed were ripped to shreds or blasted to atoms.

The attack continued until all of Mr Jurassic’s cannons were emptied. The blue glowing coils that wrapped around the barrel faded back to dull grey as fresh magazines were autoloaded into their firing chambers.

The entire settlement below them had been reduced to a large crater that was composed of many smaller ones. Everything beneath was brutalized and turned into twisted scraps of metal, or heaps of bloody meat.

The Hallowed’s cybernetics were torn apart and twisted, chunks of pallid flesh and shards of bone still stuck to them.

Dull red blood began to pool at the very center of the crater.

The two corvettes and the four mecha descended down to 50 meters above the settlement. Now that they were this close, their sensors could easily see the damage they had inflicted.

It was all incredibly gruesome and many found it difficult to stomach. Locke and Fluke most of all. Their mouths gaped at the sheer amount of damage they did. After all, their guns were meant to hit ship armor, not people.

Azrael came on their comms displays. She too was visibly distraught by what she saw on her screens.

“I’m not very comfortable with this,” she said. “These people deserve better than to be reduced to this.”

“None of us are,” replied Freya. “But we gotta do this, just this once. We’ll burn their bodies later, and care for them, I promise.”

“I get it. I just... I gotta voice myself, you know?”

Raijin’s mecha descended slowly towards the center, where all the blood was pooling. She slowly spun 360 degrees in a circle as she performed a deep scan all around her.

Nothing.

Her mecha’s main armor plates opened up like a flower, along with the piloting core just beneath. Miko leaned out slightly, and looked at the devastation below her.

The thick smell of blood hit her nose, and stayed there for some time. Though her stomach turned slightly, it didn’t bother her as much as she thought it would have.

Then she produced a small black box from within her core’s storage compartments. It wasn’t very large, and sat nicely in her small palm. The cube itself was matte black and perfectly square.

She took a good look at it in admiration then tossed it out of her core.

As it fell, it began to crumble apart. Entire chunks of it broke off and disintegrated into black sand. And even those particles broke down even further, until they were practically invisible to the eye.

And before the cube could hit the water, it vanished into nothingness.

Trillions of nanites in a near-invisible swarm spread all over the settlement. Each one found a home on everything that was out there. Dirt, mud, metal, blood, cybernetics, logic circuits, databanks, everything.

It didn’t matter what it was, they ingrained themselves in. They wove between the molecules, and hid in the spaces few and far between.

.....