(Colin) Crush//Dominion
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Crush//Dominion Part Three: White Shadows
“The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI, obscures the true horror of this monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds. They are creating their own private army of demons.”
Commissioner Pravin Lal
Report on Mind-Machine Interface
During the Earthsieges, it was said that the Cybrids had once developed several field prototypes of a weapon codenamed DOKAW, or the De-Orbital Kinetic Automated Weapon. It was a relatively simple device, merely a satellite which was home to several blocks of steel/titanium composite with a spherical diamond at its core. All the satellite had to do was release one of the blocks, and guided thrusters sent it on a vector towards its target. Once it hit the atmosphere, physics eventually took its course.
Survivors of the device recalled vividly what they saw: a white-hot streak of light arcing through the sky, and then suddenly the earth beneath their feat appeared to simply…shatter. It was generally considered a good thing that the Cybrids never really developed the infrastructure that would allow them to produce more of the devices.
When the war ended, and humanity was once more able to return to space, all of the satellites were carefully disabled, dismantled, and transferred quietly to warehouse facilities where they were left to the dusts of time.
Until today, anyway, Lorana thought idly. The urge to shudder had nothing to do with the fact that she was knee-deep in snow, or the fact that it was cold at all. Her one-piece grey-coloured exothermic suit as well as her body implants made her immune to environmental extremes.
From where she stood at the top of the snow-covered hill, she rubbed her grey eyes in weariness and took another look around.
Globally speaking, she was somewhere just a few hundred kilometres south of the northern pole on Terra. There was no visible sun, but the sky radiated a deep purple, gradually turning to a glowing pink the closer it got to the horizon. The ground was made mostly of gently rolling hills and pine trees. Snow hung from branches and covered the ground. It was eerily still.
The arctic beauty was marred only by a deep gouge in the earth, where something very hot and heavy had slammed in to the ground at respectable portion of Mach 25, biting the side out of a hill as it went. All along the deep wound in the earth, broken piles of machinery, HERCULANS, tanks, and the occasional broken body lay scattered about, some in clusters, some flung far away from where they were originally standing. Small fires sent plumes of smoke into the air before eventually burning themselves out.
Lorana moved quickly through the snow, ignoring the fact that there was lot of it to move through. She proceeded through the middle of the mini-trench the DOKAW had suddenly and violently created, looking for a suitably large wreck.
There.
The shattered hulk of a massive Myrmidon tank lay before her, leaning against the side of the canyon’s wall. Most of the left tread had been blown away, and the cockpit had been torn right from its mount. The rest of the vehicle was covered with deep impact striations. Lorana could not help but feel a brief pang of pity for the fate of whatever unlucky pilot had ridden inside the machine.
On the fore of the machine, a one-proud symbol, partially covered by scorch marks, lay openly. It was a relatively simple marker, just a picture of Earth surrounded by eight different stars.
A pretty unlikely symbol for a group of rebels.
The Free Earth Turkhazik rebellion was never very high on the list of priority items of the Empire. That was before they somehow managed to acquire enough cash to turn themselves into a potent fighting force. After tracing the origin of the transactions to the Chinese black market, the Emperor had ordered the immediate extermination of these “rebellious upstarts.”
Grand Master Caanon Weathers was quick to rule out a deployment of the elite Imperial Knights in the area, however; instead, he chose to deploy an antiquated attack satellite and took the opportunity to test a “special” project high-level Imperial scientists had been working on for quite some time.
Lorana withdrew a long cobalt-blue tube from her pocket, pressed a button, and stepped well away from the wrecked tank. She tossed the tube into the center of the wreck.
After a few seconds, shining threads of quicksilver splayed out across the tank’s surface, eventually covering the entire mass of the machine so that it looked as if it had been covered completely in liquid silver. Then, the entire thing appeared to melt into a pile of mercurial liquid. Its surface reflected the details around it beautifully.
The quicksilver began to take on a more definitive shape, reassembling itself into flat, angular panels of aligned crystal steel.
When the transformation was complete, the quicksilver appeared to simply evaporate, leaving in its place a beautiful, fully operational Swiftwind reconnaissance jeep.
“Bioderm 1-1 to
“This is Control,” the scrambled voice replied. “Speak.”
Lorana bit her lip. “The test was a complete success. It looks like the device is finally ready to move from prototype to field use.”
“Excellent. Well done, Lorana. Return to base. Control out.”
Lorana repressed a sigh as she hopped nimbly into the jeep’s driving seat. The tech-heads at control were steadily growing more and more impersonal as time wore on.
She floored the pedal and drove away from what remained of the rebel vehicles
At the end of the artificial trench, a spherical diamond glinted in the fading light.
* * *
The Earth Empire of the twenty-ninth century was by no means the mightiest force within the human solar system. Prattle though the propagandist Imperial News Network might about the strength of the Empire’s military and jokingly titled “foreign policy”, even the average Imperial citizen who was regularly spoon-fed such propaganda regularly and barely had enough neurons to form a synapse knew that if a force of sufficient numbers were to come along, the Empire and its citizenry could be quickly and brutally crushed.
Skeptics wondered if, possibly, the colonies of Mars and Venus might be such a force. True, they allegedly served the Empire by law—after all, it was Terran agencies that had established the colonies in the first place. But Solomon Petresun had been steadily raising mining and production quotas from the colonies for decades. Going to mars and working in a mine or factory facility was once seen as a good way to make money, but now people who thought that making a living on one of the colonies were typically pointed and laughed at. Quotas had risen so high that some of the miners—a lot of miners—organized a resistance force known on Mars and Venus as the Free Mars Rebellion and the Umbral Thorn respectively.
True, the early years of the resistance were particularly difficult for the rebels. Aside from food shortages and lack of proper medical care, the refitted cargo vehicles used as combat units were simply no match for the equipment of the Imperial Police—the “Imp Lice”—and the greater numbers at their disposal.
Then came rumours that the rebellions on Mars and Venus simultaneously discovered a hidden cache of advanced alien technology on their respective worlds. This new technology was christened “CacheTech” by the engineers who examined the weapons and found that they were disturbingly easy to adapt to their retrofitted HERCULANS.
The Empire was quick to quash that particular rumour, still maintaining that the rebels were desperate and ill-equipped. Why, then, after a clever data mole made certain classified data swiftly and brutally unclassified, did the Empire continue to downplay its total recorded losses throughout the ongoing campaign against the rebels?
In the end, it was generally decided that the rebels might or might not have the capability to launch a credible offensive against Earth. Such an invasion, though, was deemed ultimately foolish—the Rebellions both claimed that all they wanted was to kick the Empire off of their respective worlds, and if they did choose to invade Earth, they would simply be overwhelmed by the Empire’s greater quantity of force—no matter how advanced their rumoured technology might be.
In the back of every citizen’s mind, though, there were always the Cybrids. For the third time in as many centuries, people began wondering if another Cybrid invasion was imminent, despite the seemingly temporary distraction of the rebellions on the Imperial news feeds.
There was no doubt among the higher echelon of Imperial intelligence that the Cybrids would have the numbers to crush humanity. Even the most optimistic projections showed that the Empire would still be badly outmatched and out-equipped in any event, which is why the military build-up continued. The Empire used Prometheus and his Cybrid legions as an excuse to gouge the colonies for what they were worth, and then some. True, the Empire’s forces had grown from the days of desperate struggle when the Cybrids had first launched their genocidal attack upon humanity, when the under-equipped HERCULAN forces of the day struggled valiantly against the Cybrid onslaught, but the sad reality—a reality never revealed to the public—was that even though the Empire’s military had grown far beyond what it had been since the days of the old Terra Defence Force during the original Earthsieges, it still wasn’t ever going to be enough.
Yet there was more hidden reasoning in increasing colonial quotas beyond sustainability. Rebellion had been purposefully in mind when the quotas had been hiked beyond leaving anything for the miners and workers at the end of the day. Logically, if the Cybrids chose to invade Earth at any time within the next century, and the Emperor’s finest tacticians said without a doubt that they would, then, lthe outer colonies would be the first to fall. Colonies that, depite rebelling against the Empire, had turned themselves into a potent military force. The Jovian colonies around Jupiter and Saturn, the colonies in the asteroid belt, Mars…all would have to face the wrath of the Cybrids before Earth or the inner worlds would.
To this end, the Emperor released and publicized the “Fortress Earth Proclamation”, which, after removing the sugar coating, essentially said “Earth is vital to the survival of humanity. The colonies can go hang, and while they’re at it, we’re going to steal their wallet, too.”
The Empire could prattle on and on about how much it valued the tradition and rituals of other cultures, but when it came right down to it the colonists knew that all Petresun cared for was Earth.
And yet, despite the cultural gap between Earth and the colonies, despite the resentment the Martians held for the Dirtborn, even though the Emperor didn’t want conflict, all parties had one thing in common: they would rather go down kicking and screaming rather than quietly into that good night.
The past may lay in the past, and though any individual on any side would prefer nothing but stability, the Imperial Saber and the Colonial Shockmace are required training in their respective combat schools for a reason.
posted by Thea at 9:56 a.m.
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