Ravens of Eternity

214 Blood & Flame, Pt Mia’s boots clacked as she walked over the polished marble floor. She was still in her uniform, and was slightly frazzled. It was less than an hour earlier when she was forced to run from the fight, her frigate heavily impaired.

She made her way down the long, decorated hallway and stopped in front of a couple of stately double doors. The two Prophet guards on each side of it nodded to her, even as she nervously wrung her hands in anticipation.

Mia balled them into fists, then eased the tension out. Once they were stable, she looked back at the guards, and nodded to them.

Then, they opened the doors for her.

She gathered up all of her courage and stepped on through. The guards shut the doors behind her as she walked further into the spacious, regal office.

In the very center of the room was a heavy obsidian desk, which looked as though it was carved out of a single, impossible piece. Its surface was clean and free of clutter, though there was a datapad that sat on one edge. A stylish terminal hovered above the middle as well.

But Father wasn’t at his desk. Instead, he was off to the side by a multitude of his design tables, which were laid around him in a semi-circle. Each of them displayed different strands of DNA helices along with a great variety of genomic sequences.

He was playing with one of those strands, and scrolled up and down it carefully, as though he was looking for something in particular. He stopped, looked over a patch with excruciating detail, but shook his head and kept on scrolling.

He stopped once again, smiled, and pulled random nucleobases from the helix and tossed them aside. Then, he reattached new nucleobases and altered the chain ever so slightly.

.....

Father stepped back from his work filled with pride.

“Mia,” he said. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

Although he addressed his daughter, he didn’t turn around from his work to look at her. Instead, he went right back to it, and began to scroll up and down the helix.

For some reason, Mia was pained by this.

“Well,” he continued, “what do you want?”

“A-apologies, father,” she began. “I need to report that we’ve... lost a few of our Hallowed bases.”

Father froze on the spot, his arm midway from pulling out another clump of human code. He let it go, and his arm lowered slowly.

It was only then that he turned to look at Mia, but his eyes were dark and filled with enmity.

“Say that again,” he said.

Although his tone seemed calm and even, it was clear that there was a deep roiling anger underneath it. Mia was unsure if it was a facade or utter control over himself, but either way, she was frightened to her core.

She steeled herself, even as she watched his jaw clench and unclench over and over.

“Do you remember Freya?” she began.

Father’s eyes widened at the revelation. His fists clenched up as his wrath found something to focus on.

“How could I forget,” he sneered. “Your brother was greatly traumatized when she killed him. It even bled into his current version.”

“Well, she’s discovered us,” Mia said. “And she’s destroying our... your work, Father. She’s burning your bases, one after the other.”

He looked Mia up and down as she very nearly took equal ownership of his project. But brushed it aside as he had bigger things to deal with. There was plenty of time to punish her for her insolence... and her failures.

“Why haven’t you destroyed her on my behalf?” he asked.

There was a hint of accusation in his tone, which dug right into Mia. She felt its barbs deep in her chest.

“Isn’t that why I gave you your fleet?” he continued. “Or did you think that was all for show, hm?”

Mia could only hang her head in shame.

“She ambushed me,” she lied. “And with more numbers than I could handle. It was all I could do to get away. The ship’s in the yard now, getting repaired.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, suspicious at her words. But there was little he could do but take her at her word.

“How many bases has she destroyed?” he asked.

“Only seven,” Mia responded. “Which is good, right? I was at least able to contain it.”

Father glared at Mia, venom in his eyes.

“Ten percent is too much,” he growled. “Far too much. Get your repairs done quickly, then get back out there and end this Freya. You are not to allow her to take any more bases, and if you fail at that...”

The silence hung in the air between them.

“Well, we don’t need to talk about what happens to failures, do we?” he finished.

Mia tamped down as much of her fear as she could, then bowed before him.

“No Father,” she said. “That’s not necessary. I won’t fail you.”

Father’s grimace settled into a smug smile, but Mia felt no happiness from it.

“Good,” he said. “Now get out of here. And bring Darius and his fleet with you. Double up, and crush that pest into the ground.”

~

The whole team hid themselves in a far off patch of forest like they did before, and kept watch over the smoldering settlement over 20 kilometers away. Once again, their ships were in full repair mode, though Amelia was now missing more than a few sections of her armor.

Her armor all along her port side and topside were almost completely trashed, and some of it had to be shorn off completely. Since they were far out in the middle of nowhere, there was no way to re-equip her.

The last thing they needed was for her to get back into a fight, but she could still be useful as a “farseer”.

The mecha were doing much better – they had only suffered superficial damage for the most part. Merely dented or pock-marked armor, which they could easily repair. A few parts had been scored and cut into by the enemy’s beamcannons, but none were serious.

In fact, they still had plenty of spare parts to pick from, including the parts from this battle.

It was their shields that had taken the brunt of the damage, and had taken the most materials to repair.

Still, even the amount of damage they all received chewed through their repair ingots, and were down to little under a quarter. It was clear they needed to rearm at an actual maintenance depot, and soon.

For now, they needed to stay out of sight.

It was close to two cycles later by the time Mia and her frigate reappeared at the settlement to clean it up. And once again, they crowded themselves on Amelia’s bridge and spied on their enemies.

Half of them groaned with dismay when they saw a second frigate pierce through the clouds and join the first.

“Looks like they got their armor repaired ridiculously fast,” said Locke. “And they got reinforcements to boot.”

“Gifts from Daddy,” mocked Freya.

“Say all you want,” said T-Rex, “but that second frigate is top-notch too, according to its readouts. I mean, not nearly as good as the first, but still.”

“The two of them could easily rip us apart,” added Xylo. “Even if Mr Jurassic could shrug off most of their shots, they’d still outshoot his repair ingots.”

“Don’t gotta dig into my ship like that, honestly.”

Freya pored over the scanned signatures, and counted up all the mecha.

“They brought in three dozen Stormriders,” she said. “Six wings of six. And they mixed up their loadouts to better answer us. Shields, polearms, snipers. Would definitely be rough facing all that.”

“It appears they have also made some tweaks to their operational settings as well,” added Raijin. “Their thrusters have also been reinforced. It is clear they have made adjustments to better protect their vulnerabilities.”

“Guess they aren’t fucking around any longer,” said T-Rex.

He sighed deeply afterwards, as though victory was now far away from them.

Then, one of Raijin’s screens began to beep and notifications began to flood in. They were followed with a slew of reports and datapoints.

“I’m receiving signal!” she cried out. “It appears that Truesight has successfully overrun their Security Intelligence, and is now in command of oversight.”

The others’ eyes quickly lit up with hope, even as Raijin scanned the data that streamed across her screens. It was a great deal of operational information about the Prophets’ fleet. There were schematics and blueprints and loadouts.

They were accompanied by personnel records, starmaps, and dozens of coordinates.

“It appears that Truesight detected us,” she continued, “and sent us a complete dump of their ship’s databanks. We now know everything they do.”

“So, we’ve got info on all their settlements, then?” asked Azrael.

She was giddy with excitement. If they had access to all of the settlements, then all their problems were solved. Sort of.

“We have far more than their settlements,” Raijin replied. “See for yourself.”

She pushed her data through to the other screens on the bridge, and everyone gawked at the sheer amount of it all. What Raijin had said was absolutely true – they now had access to everything that Mia did as well.

And the data was all encompassing. And certainly overwhelming at times.

Raijin pushed the navigational data to the main screen, and displayed all of the coordinates they had across Federation space. A great number of them – close to half – were located in the colonial territories.

Seven of them matched with the settlements they had already confronted, one of them being the one in front of them. This meant to them that there were many more for them to deal with. Far more than they anticipated.

“Well, hell,” said Locke. “Now we can just flatten them, right? No need to hack in and do all that nonsense. We just close shop one by one as fast as we can. And we’re done.”

“Plus we can go after any settlement we want,” added Fluke. “With this many, no way could they ambush us again. I mean, the odds are against ’em.”

“No,” said Freya adamantly. “We’re not hitting a settlement next.”

“What?” said T-Rex. “Why not? Isn’t freeing all these settlements why we’re here in the first place? Or are you suggesting we take on those frigates first?”

“Both of those options are a complete waste of time and resources. A fool’s errand. What we need to do now is go after Father, while we’ve got the element of surprise.”

Freya turned to look at everyone as she spoke. As always, she believed in ending the fight before it could become worse. And to her, the best way to kill an army was to cut off its head.

“If we attack anyone but him,” she continuned, “we’re signaling that we’ve got their coords. It won’t take them a second to evacuate Father. Or turtle up defenses. Or straight up vanish. We’ve gotta go after him now, while we can. We end him, and we end the Prophets for good.”

.....

She inhaled and exhaled deeply – this was exactly the chance that they needed. There was no way they could let their chance slip away so easily.

“We can always go after everything else afterwards,” she continued. “It’s not like they’re going anywhere. If their precious Father is dead, they won’t know what to do, and won’t have anywhere to go. They’ll practically be stationary targets for us.”

Her words settled into everyone, and they realized that what she proposed was the smartest play they could make.

“Okay, that’s great and all,” said Xylo, “but how the hell are we supposed to find this Father of theirs? He could be anywhere in the galaxy. Anywhere along these... hundred or so coordinates.”

Scattered across the starmap were those hundred coordinates, three-quarters of which were marked as “habitable”. And they were literally everywhere. Many were out in uncharted, lawless space. A few were in Hegemony space, which bothered Max to no end.

But Freya pointed at a lone coordinate far from the colonies. It was, oddly, well within the Federation, but deep in the Outer Systems. Even odder, it was marked as a high-security system despite how far away it was from the Core Systems.

“He’s there,” she said. “I bet my life on it.”