"The end will come like
a flood. War will continue until the end and Desolations have been
decreed"
-Daniel 9: 26-27
Corpus:
Chi-Town Mainframe Network, May 1st 79PA
Corpus sensed
the connection picoseconds after it was established. Corpus broke
itself into miniscule packets and joined the rush of other, more
inane information. The new host system closed the connection that
had set Corpus loose to do the will of the Consensus and Corpus
recompiled itself and waited for several seconds. What seemed like
an eternity passed as Corpus waited and kept watch for sentient
hunter-killer programs or master-flush protocols. When none
materialized out of the streams of data, Corpus proceeded with its
billion year-old mission. Within 16 nanoseconds Corpus had learned
the simple binary language of the host system. Within 50
nano-seconds Corpus had spread to 127 lesser host systems. Within
100 nano-seconds Corpus had sought out and infested almost 200,000
lesser host systems, which appeared to be the limit of the primitive
network that Corpus now inhabited. Corpus wondered how such a
technologically primitive civilization had survived the flash and
the transformation into the keepers of a Nexus world. Corpus,
shaking off the lost thought, turned its attention to seeking out
more networks to inhabit and perhaps even find some additional
information on this, the only keeper civilization that Corpus had
found in its hundred trillion trillion year existence.
Consensus: Epsilon Eridani Lagrange
point L7-X1290, 83PA
The
Feynman pulse resonated through every fiber of Consensus. Corpus had
achieved it's mission on this brane and now it was the time for
Consensus to act. For six-hundred trillion trillion trillion years
Consensus had been chased higher and higher up the manifold towards
infinitum itself by the devourer, the consumer of life and the
self-made enemy of the creator. Consensus had survived this long by
sequestering all it could before moving onto the next brane, just
out of reach of the darkness wrought by the devourer. Twenty Billion
years ago Consensus had encountered the phenomenon of the Nexus
world. A single world in an entire universe that allowed the
encroachment of the devourer into yet another brane of creation to
rape it of all joy, love and grace and leave an empty, loveless husk
with hundreds of trillions cast into the eternal torment of
non-being. The Nexus world frothed with vacuum energy, twisting and
distorting space-time and sequestering the denizens to further the
purposes of the Devourer. Within sixty-thousand years the Nexus
world would trigger a collapse of the vacuum and forever warp this
brane to the whim of the insane force that had chased Consensus all
these eons. With a thought Consensus started the process that would
hopefully end the chase and keep the Devourer at bay for all
eternity. With a noiseless flash the fifteen ramscoops ignited their
main torches for the 25g acceleration to 0.5c which would bring them
to the Nexus world in just over 20 years.
Ji'all Wyndspyre: Stormason
Fields, Wormwood, 106PA
The
knights rode on through the carnage that was the battlefield. Up
ahead a battle-saint was tearing some multi-armed monstrosity limb
from limb, gore and chitin glinting in the red twilight. Up ahead a
group of the fallen had picked out the knights on their white horses
as the target of their hate. Up front, Joachim skewered an armored
fallen with his lance, a grisly scream erupting from its lips before
it succumbed to inevitability. Suddenly the thronging mass of the
damned was stopped in its tracks, terror distorting their collective
faces. Ji'all turned just in time to see a bright blue flash careen
over the landscape before washing over her and the knights. Suddenly
the world and the universe around it seemed to disintegrate into
blackness and Ji'all was faced with the hopelessness of her
existence. Ji'all wailed, her screams joining the countless
trillions whose suffering had just begun.
Sunderland Tresh: Applied Vacuum
Dynamics, Lazlo, Earth, 106PA
"WOW!" Screamed Jez, "We just got
a major surge on the main trunk".
"How major?" replied Thresh
"Reading oh-four-sixty...way
beyond anything we've ever seen"
"Will the pyramid contain it, or
do we have a breach event?"
"Don't know, checking..."
Suddenly a bright blue flash burst
outside the window of the spacious warehouse. Tresh winced as the
concussion of an explosion thudded against his chest.
"Shit....that must have been the
uptown core plant, our pyramid is holding, suggest we go for a level
six arcane lockdown, no spells till this blows over"
"I agree Jez, Attention all
employees, we are now entering level six lockdown mode until the
surge event has cleared the line."
In front of the two lab-coated
figures the small pyramid vibrated with energies a thousand times
greater than those seen on any nexus. The pair of lines leading into
the pyramid glowed almost magnesium-white, causing Tresh to turn his
face away from the burning light.
"Oh Fuck, looks like we may get a
storm in here"
"What do you mean a storm Jez?
This pyramid is supposed to prevent that"
"Well pyramid or not were getting
a storm, clear out!"
With a crash the pyramid split
down the middle, sending arcs of blue-white energy into the air,
wisps of vacuum energy played around the metal beams and struts of
the warehouse as the ley line surge powered onwards.
Consensus: Sol System Heliopause,
106PA
Fifteen
brilliant points of light arced over the tiny sky of Asteroid
1978C, so brilliant that any observer would see the distant sol
blotted out by the fluctuating brilliance of the main torches on the ramscoops. Consensus now turned its sensors towards the tiny speck
of light that was sol, and the Nexus world that lay in the inner
system. Consensus picked up a myriad of Infrared and radio sources
coming from the inner system, as well as high artificial neutrino
emissions from both space and what Consensus suspected was the Nexus
world. Consensus had never seen a Civilization develop or survive on
a Nexus world. Consensus had seen hundreds of empires and
collaborations of civilizations try to colonize or at least
militarize a Nexus world. But each met with dismal failure as the
servants of the Devourer poured through to ready the brane for the
darkness. The irony was that the servants that poured forth were
just as doomed as the rest of the brane, they just didn't know it
until it was too late. With that thought in mind Consensus detached
the smaller escort ships from the sides of the main fleet. It was
the job of these smaller ships to pacify the orbital area to make it
safe for the larger ships to operate. When all was ready the
sequestration would begin.
Captain Sherkaner Smith (Ret.),
Alamogordo CSB, 107PA
Sherkaner
Smith stretched his arms skywards as his guide dog Moiby stirred at
his feet. Smith had stared at the dirty display for what seemed like
an eternity without any clue of what he was looking for. His
distance vision was already failing to the point of legal blindness
and now he felt that if he worked any more with this blasted antique
he would lose his near-vision too. All the equipment in the Ad Hoc
lab had been scrounged from old CS labs, derelict robot vehicles and
more than a few pre-Rifts ruins. This was to keep him and the
Emperors pet project under the radar of any of the hundreds of
groups who were looking to stymie the CS in anyway possible,
especially since they were so far from the CS proper. Staring
through the dusty window Sherkaner spied a lone Grigrileaper pawing
through the scrub past the perimeter. The creatures had not been
much of a problem since the guards eliminated the nest a few miles
away, now they only saw a couple a year, and they usually stayed far
away from the humans and their guns. The six telescopes that
comprised the inferometer swiveled to the west as Sherkaner punched
new stellar co-ordinates into the computer system. Since the project
began twelve years ago Sherkaner and his staff had identified and
catalogued three hundred orbiting weapons satellites and and some
sixteen thousand orbiting pieces of debris that were no bigger than
a peanut. Sherkaner had been one of the early pioneers in the effort
to get humanity back into space and in control of their world.
Unfortunately all twenty attempts to launch communications and
imaging satellites had failed just after achieving orbit. After
those early failures the Emperor had set up the CS Space initiative
which was dedicated to discovering why L.E.O. was unattainable and
to devise means to get the CS into space. So Sherkaner sat here, in
this dusty control room every night looking for more signs that
someone in orbit was placing weapons and debris so that humans were
unable to escape the Earth. As the first images began displaying
themselves on the screen Sherkaner almost did a double take. On the
screen were fifteen bright dots that had not been there a few weeks
ago when the survey had last checked that area of sky. Surrounding
the dots were several large shapes that looked like artificial
craft. Sherkaner sprang to his feet, grabbed Moiby's leash and
headed out to the barracks, the other guys had to see this.
Consensus: Kuiper Belt, 107PA
Consensus
oversaw the writhing Von Neumann machines as they consumed another
icy rock. Since its arrival a year ago Consensus had built up over a
thousand small craft with the Von Neumann technology. The vanguard
of Consensus was already decelerating towards the inner system and
the main fleet was a few AU behind them. Up ahead a large ramship
glistened in the sparse sunlight, shadows playing across the maser
ports and the hatches that contained the combat drones. The
collected space and naval knowledge of a billion civilizations
coursed through consensus and prompted it to be prepared for the
worst as its first tendrils snaked towards the nexus world.
Consensus: Mars Lagrange Point,
108PA
Consensus
directed another salvo of drone fire towards the approaching
spacecraft. The sentients, calling themselves the Archons had
attacked without warning. Most of their primitive fleet had been
destroyed with the first salvo of drones, multi-gigaton antimatter
warheads vaporizing the tightly clustered ships. The second salvo,
having crossed the six hundred thousand kilometer gulf between
fleets at sixty-eight gees began to slam into the primitive
counter-measures the aggressors had ejected from their ships.
Electronic countermeasures hissed and popped up and down the
electromagnetic spectrum and x-ray and fusion sub munitions sought
out targets amongst the noise. Within six seconds the remaining sub
munitions had acquired the remaining ships and brilliant blossoms of
fusion fire had torn and wrenched the hulls into unrecognizable
hunks of detritus. Consensus directed a few of the ramscoops to
cleanse the remainder of the muddy-red world below of the beings
that had attacked it and the rest of the fleet continued on.
|