Chapter 044: War

Rear Admiral Elsa Vorontsov was a rare case of pre-War of Purity Solar Commonwealth’s flag officer being a Variant, in this case a cathuman. She received command of the 51st Cruiser Squadron - part of Admiral Okonkwo’s fleet - a few weeks before the outbreak of the War of Purity.

Her forces were participating in a military exercise at the edge of the Asimov system when the Asimov Massacre occurred. Lacking firepower to stop the execution of her fleet, Rear Admiral Vorontsov retreated into the Hyperspace and started a years-long campaign of guerilla warfare, doing her best to delay the transhuman takeover of the sector - and then the campaign of extermination of its human and variant inhabitants.

When it become obvious that the extermination in the sector is reaching its end, and that the Commonwealth as a whole is unaware of it, Vorontsov’s forces launched a suicide attack upon the hyperlane exit. Soon after last of her ships was destroyed, transhumans discovered that it was a diversion, allowing a single frigate to sneak through the hyperlane and bring Vorontsov’s last message to Vice Admiral Singh, one describing the genocide of the Humanity Ascension Program in details.

From that point onwards, said message was transmitted to every transhuman outpost, city and fleet within a system upon the arrival of the solarian fleet - together with a demand to surrender unconditionally within 24 hours. After that period, no offers of surrender were accepted and no prisoners were taken.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 9, Page 201

***

TCS Cutlass, Command Section

01:14 09.08.2610 STT

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

Finally, they reached the planet.

It was the second world in the system. Earth-sized planet that appeared to have been covered mostly with an ocean - there were a few small archipelagos here and there, but otherwise it was just a blue ball hanging in space. The planet had a single moon, or, to be exact, it used to have a single moon.

“I have no idea what happened to it.” Tendrik commented, while Nekia nodded fervently in the background. The entire crew gathered on Cutlass’ bridge. “But we do detect ruined precursor structures on some of the remains, so it was probably intentional.”

“Relativistic bombardment.” AI/DRYAD’s voice was impersonal, while slightly feminine. It still avoided contact with the crew, but sometimes did offer some input.

“Relativistic bombardment?” Christopher asked. It was the first time he heard the term.

“You take a large chunk of some resistant and heavy metal…” Tiriel replied. “...accelerate it to a fraction of lightspeed and ram it into a planet. Enough to split a continent in half and sometimes blew off the atmosphere of the attacked planet. But while I agree that certain bits of what I see carry similarities to planets after relativistic bombardments, it is… way more destroyed. It is less ‘split the continent in half’ and more ‘split a moon in half’.”

“Were there many planets that went through that?” Christopher asked while staring at Tiriel. Her words seemed to indicate that,and it was a rather scary concept.

“In the past, yeah.” Tiriel replied. “This is what, in a rather primitive way, was done to transhuman core worlds at the end of the War of Purity. Together with a lot of orbital bombardment to clean up survivors. Sometimes happened during the Unification Wars. But if you try that today against a world with civilian population, you are blacklisted from the Confederation. So it only happens against worlds of aliens that have managed to persuade us bloodily enough that diplomacy is impossible.”

“Someone must have really hated the precursors.” Ananti added from the background. “It’s not a weapon that you use during a civil war, right?”

“Depends.” Tiriel replied coldly. “We used it against ourselves in the past, as already stated. Sure, it was against completely different countries, but even then especially the War of Purity was a civil war. So, lieutenant.” She turned her head to face Christopher. “Any idea what we’re supposed to do now?”

“Angel told me to travel to the second world of the system, without specifying anything beyond that.” Christopher replied. “So as much as I’m willing to trust him conditionally, I have no idea what to do now. And I’m certainly not going to land on an alien planet without some preparations. Errr… are any of you familiar with the first landing procedures?” He was certain that something like that existed.

“I am.” Tiriel was, of course, an indispensable part of the team. “Give me a few hours to make thorough scans, then a few probes here and there, then the landing party.”

“So… who wants to join said party? Christopher looked around the people gathered in the room. “I’m sure that you are all overjoyed to be able to join an excursion party entering a completely alien world on the behest of some extradimensional entity whose motives are a mystery to us, but we should probably keep the party to the minimum. I’m, naturally, included.” Angel told him to go there, after all.

“I am the medic and the enviro specialist.” Tiriel replied first. “So I have to go. Procedures and so on.”

To a great surprise, others weren’t even remotely as interested. Even Kivanna didn’t want to get anywhere near the planet, and she was their only pilot. Only Cycle and Nekia wanted to go, which - with the former having qualifications as a pilot - kinda fixed the problem of Christopher not feeling right with the idea of forcing Kivanna to do anything she didn’t like to.

Nekia was probably interested in going because Christopher was going. It wasn’t exactly the right motivation, but it was good enough.

“Great. So, a free time for anyone but Tiriel.” Christopher announced. “Who wants to play the Gates of Infinity?” Suddenly everyone was enthusiastic.

Christopher missed the times before Rukh’s death.

***

TCS Cutlass, Command Section

03:17 09.08.2610 STT

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

Tiriel was sitting in one of the armchairs on the Cutlass’ bridge, staring at the display. Her head did turn towards him when he entered.

“Tea? Really?” She seemed slightly amused. “For me?”

“Well, I decided that missing the raid due to work qualifies you for some compensation.” He could only hope that it was a good tea. “You didn’t miss a lot, we got trashed.” She left out a slightly undignified chuckle.

“That is what you get for trying it without your magnificent elven princess.” She was extremely cocky, but only for the sake of comedy. He rewarded her attempts with a chuckle. Then She took the tea off his hands. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” If it wasn’t good tea, then she decided to not ruin his self-image and said nothing about it. He sat on the chair close to her. “So, how’s it going?”

“Small talk, huh.” She looked at him with a theatrical suspicion for a short while, before her eyes returned to the display. “Mostly trying to find any precursor structures, since I don’t think that the angels wanted you to go sightseeing. While also checking stuff such as the atmosphere composition and geological formations for any type of anomalies. Thus far it appears that the planet lacks any presence of the Precursors, but is a perfect example of an Earth-like world. Ready for colonization. Now back to you.” She turned her head to face him again. “What is it?”

“There is no fooling you.” Christopher replied.

“I know.” Tiriel replied with not a single hint of humility in her voice. “You like me that way, don’t you?” At this point Christopher was certain. Well, almost certain. Something was bothering her. Badly.

Of course, unless he used his meta-empathy on her - which he refused to do on the basis of principles - making her confess was probably a fool’s errand. She was incredibly stubborn with things like that. Unless she came to a conclusion that it’s time to speak up about it on her own, she was going to stay that way.

He still wouldn’t know how much Rukh’s death hit her if he didn’t literally walk right into her while she was drinking herself under the table.

“Alright, alright.” She interrupted his thoughts. “I do not need superpowers to read from your face that you want me to tell you what’s my problem today. Your face is incredibly easy to read once someone spends more than a few weeks with you, you know?” It wasn’t like that in the past. Either angels changed something, or his meta-empathy radiated his emotions without his conscious input. Making others be able to read his intent easier.

“So you ARE going to tell me without having me go through several hours of begging?” Christopher looked at her, clearly shocked. “Who are you and what have you done to Tiriel?!”

She laughed. Loudly. Only remotely in a way befitting a noble. Then again, her observance of such minuscule details of nobility when among the Recovery Team Eight was rather limited as of late.

“Yeah, I guess that’s as far as my infiltration attempt goes!” She added before her face turned serious. “All that Precursor stuff around us. You know that it is not exactly a good thing, right?”

She lost him at this. How was discovering so many marvelous bits of ancient technology NOT a good thing?

He asked her about it. And she shook her head.

“You forget about the Long War.” She finally said. “Whoever gets their hand on this place… even finding out how to replicate the jumpgate we came through is enough to make a faction win the war. A single jumpgate in every member states’ capital, and suddenly all of the battles are won. Like the initial campaigns of the War of Purity, when the Commonwealth outnumbered transhumans ten to one, but they had the jumpgates. So they could still have numerical superiority whenever it mattered. And, well, we have members of more than one faction within our group.”

He stared at her for a few seconds, trying to understand. When he did, it wasn’t pretty.

“You mean that… APD and RPC might come to blows over it? Even within our fleet?” After all that the fleet went through thus far, it was almost unthinkable.

“‘Might’ come to blows?” She chuckled, but with not even a single bit of happiness visible on her face. “They WILL come to blows. Their cooperation is a marriage of convenience. For APD, the RPC is a bunch of religious radicals that would happily blow people up over a religious disagreement. For RPC, APD is the root cause of the majority of the woes of the current Confederation. And why I do not think of democracy as something the Devil created, I do see a fair point or two or RPC’s side.”

He expected nothing else from her. At least she was diplomatic about it. Or so he though.

“Plesja? Their ancestors were from an APD country, but were allowed to leave and settle their own world due to it being seen as a ‘freedom of speech’ and all that.” She continued. “Nazis? Hakenkreuz started his march to greatness when a collapsing democratic government tried to strengthen itself by allying with his radical party, although this might be due to the Reich’s propagandists writing him as Hitler 2.0. They destroyed or rewritten way too many sources to be sure.” She shook her head. “I would have given you more issues the APD has with RPC, but that is honestly not my job.”

“Well, from my point of view both sides are somewhat right in their criticism.” Christopher replied. “Democracy is the best of the bad political systems… but there are no good political systems. Of course it fails sometimes, but from all the people out there, Christians should be the ones who understand how that’s normal for anything that humans touch, right?”

Big part of the theology could be summed up as ‘humans suck, they keep falling in everything but the whole point is to stand up and try again’. He knew that much. Perks of being from a religious family, even if you didn’t exactly share the sentiment.

“I see.” She replied. There was something deeply sad in her face, and something… was it a pity? “I keep forgetting you are from the past. And that you did not have an occasion to live in any of the human countries out there. Even democracy means something else than in your times.”

He didn’t like where that talk was going. But he wanted to know. Both out of curiosity - somewhat morbid - and because there was a slim but rising chance of this world being his future.

“Enlighten me.” He replied. Her first reaction was a stare. He didn’t need a metaempathy to see that she wasn’t sure if that talk was a good idea. Eventually, she decided to go with it.

“Within the same sector as Beleriand…” She finally said. “... is a democratic country. It is ACTUALLY democratic country, mind you. No privileged castes, no slavery, no political terror, very pleasant standards of life for everyone. A proud APD member with elections every four years and a lot of political parties. Although its name, cultural origin and racial composition does not matter for this talk. Now, a question to you: how many times do you think the ruling party of the country changed since the Unification Wars?”

“About thirty times?” He fired the number blindly. It was a long time since the Wars, but it sounded like a stable country. Those changed their ruling parties less often.

“Zero times.” He stared at her for a few seconds. “The ruling party of that democratic country has stayed in power for almost two centuries now. Without terror, without acting against democracy and freedom of speech.”

“How?” He asked after a few seconds of silence. “How is that possible?”

“We never got the technological singularity we were promised.” Tiriel replied. “But sociology, psychology and so on continued to improve. You can easily, if you go for just the right level of automation, you can allow everyone to live in relative comfort without sending a majority of the population to live off unemployment benefits which, historically speaking, is not a good idea. Without poverty, with next to perfect healthcare, and with local criminal activity being pretty much a forgotten dream, together with corruption of officials and politicians, what sort of incentive do you get to change anything in your country?”

“Ideology.” Christopher replied. There was also war. Tiriel once mentioned that her sector is mostly Beleriand-dominated, to the point where it was one of the few isles of peace. Which probably explained the ruling party’s of that country's length of existence. At least to a small degree.

“Ideology?” Tiriel chuckled bitterly. “You forgot that a free spread of ideas is a thing of the past now. No FTL communications, each planet an isolated space. Each colony ship took only the data that it wanted to take. There is a connection with other planets of the same country, however meager it was, but outside of it? Even the most benevolent countries out there routinely censor spread of ideologies they deem dangerous. I checked it once, back on Beleriand, you know.” She sighed loudly. “Not a single full version of Marx’s Capital within the planet. Only a few heavily censored bits in school books, each with a lengthy paragraph under it describing why Marx was entirely and totally wrong. No ‘darknet’ or however you called stuff like that in the past. All holes in the computer network available to people that aren’t genius hackers like Innocent were sealed long ago. Such books aren’t hard to come by in my homeworld, they are simply not there.”

“And the democratic countries?” Christopher asked. What he just heard made sense - in a rather terrifying way. The implications were nothing sort of horrible, and more and more weird things he learned about the future began to click in.

“Democratic countries tend to be slightly more open, but the results are worlds like Plesja.” Tiriel replied. “Ideological dystopias populated by people who were ‘infected’ by a foreign ideology, but quickly understood that they can never hope to achieve even the least important of their objectives through democracy, because their country’s system is inherently immutable. That all promises of ‘governments listening to the voice of the people’ are lies unless you become the majority, which in their case simply cannot happen. So they grow more and more radical, and if they bulk up their numbers enough to get their own planet at the edge of Human Space, you get worlds like Plesja.”

It wasn’t hard to get enough people for that, Christopher realized. Some larger countries in the sectors had close to a hundred billion inhabitants. Plesja was initially colonized, if he remembered it correctly, by about one million people. Negative side-effects of large populations - even a minuscule percentage of radicals were an army.

“But the worst bit, in the end, is parenting.” Tiriel continued, while Christopher was busy swallowing what he just heard. “In your times, children grew up to resemble their generation rather than their parents. Today… Well, I mentioned my father and mother enough times. Is it not obvious how similar I am to them? Longest War from my father, joking about men the same way as my mother… it is just the surface level of similarities. You no longer need to learn how to be a parent.” She put her finger to her temple. “All you need is a proper parenting assistant program on your personal computer. Something to point out what you are doing wrong and what you are doing well in real time. All according to the almost perfect understanding of how our minds work.”

“So that’s why…” One more thing clicked in Christopher’s mind. “I was always curious how it is possible for the wars to continue so long. Why is it impossible for some nasty space regime to start mellowing down a bit after some point, and finally get overthrown. How can the hate for transhumans continue to be so strong for so long, even considering the circumstances.”

She nodded.

“Yes, that is precisely due to this.” Tiriel added after a few seconds. “Wars do not end because we do not get a subsequent generation that is tired of it, only the next iteration of the same, warlike generation. Regimes do not mellow down, because the sons and daughters of the fanatics that set them up are almost identical to their parents. We learned so much about our own minds that we managed to master the art of inheriting traumas and prejudices. We also learned how to fix almost all mental disorders, created inherently good and corruption-proof charity groups, military organizations and even social stratas like my own that consider helping others their core mission, so there are positives.” She paused for a few seconds, before adding one last sentence. “I just do not feel like they are all that important in our current situation.”

“Ah.” Christopher at this point understood what Tiriel wanted to tell him with that lengthy talk. “And that’s where the Precursor ruins come in. The potential end of the Long War in sight.” She nodded with a solemn look on her face.

Victory in the Long War didn’t mean something as fleeting as, for example, the NATO victory in the Cold War. Ideologies that would lose in it wouldn’t be forced back into the corner and (temporarily) discredited. They would simply cease to exist. How long would it take for the APD to simply erase the concept of autocracy from human consciousness if it won the War? All while being sure that what they are doing is an act of benevolence. If that would even be a conscious thing, and not just a lengthy but immutable evolution towards what was proven to be the ‘strongest’ ideology and political system out there.

But if crazies like the Pact of Steel won, they would probably simply brainwash everyone everywhere. Erasing all possibilities of their regime collapsing - forever. And then, there was the Wall of Reason.

Space godhood awaited those that climbed it. But if more than one faction did that, the results of their war would be catastrophic, potentially lethal for the entire species - some of the supposed exotech superweapons ever excavated and the records of what the berserks used to have were beyond belief. But if Mankind was united before that, and then gained the ability to shape the Galaxy according to its whims…

Long War. The last war of nations. The last conflict of ideologies. The last competition of religions. The line separating the history of Mankind from its future.

Christopher suddenly felt really small. He told that to Tiriel.

“Be happy that there is no Ryan or Ananti here.” She replied. “Or they would change that into a pervy joke.” Her attempt to fix his mood was a welcome one, although it failed. “It is something that you should have learned at this point. Which is why I decided to have that talk.” She added.

“Why?” He wasn’t sure if he wouldn’t feel better if the talk didn’t happen. He probably would.

“Because you now have an independent command of a ship… in such circumstances.” She replied. “Sure, within the same star system as Echo. But if the angel then tells us next time to move to another star system, and then you find the key to the Wall of Reason mystery…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“If I wanted to give that key to APD… would you try to stop me?” Christopher asked slowly and quietly. It was little more than a whisper. Some things shouldn’t be said in any other tone than this. Especially as the ‘stop me’ might have been an euphemism.

“Let’s just say that I would prefer to have you share such a hypothetical key with both APD and RPC.” She replied, without looking at him. In a tone similar to his. “I do not want to choose between my loyalty to RPC and my religion… and to my friends.” She sighed. “I would be more worried with what an existence of such a hypothetical key would cause to happen among the Echo’s officers. At least after we manage to get out from this place safely, and defeat or escape both the Discord and the Corporation.”

That was certainly going to be ugly.

***

TCS Cutlass, Command Section

06:57 09.08.2610 STT

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

Christopher thought that discovering that planets of hats were the last stage of human societal evolution was the weirdest thing that happened to him that day. Alas, there was more for him in store.

In the end, Tiriel failed to find anything interesting about the world. It appeared to be just a simple ocean world, almost ready to be colonized by humans. It looked to be a fairly pleasant place to live, at least until some mysterious attacker shattered the moon. The tidal forces were severely disrupted, causing ‘abnormal weather patterns’.

Namely, storms. Sometimes rather nasty ones. But it still varied between regions. For some reason the southern hemisphere appeared to be significantly less perturbed, resulting in one of the local archipelagos to be singled out as the initial landing site.

According to Tiriel, they struck a jackpot, so to speak. The planet - recorded as Pontifex-II, or under a codename of ‘Typhoon’ in the fragmentary Corporation’s databases recovered from one of the battleships - appeared to be perfect for colonization. Even without counting the Precursor ruins and potential technological marvels to be found within, a planet like that was incredibly valuable.

Mankind lost its ability for easy terraforming with the fall of the Solar Commonwealth, when the World Forge exotech (best described as ‘fabricator for marvellously good terraforming nanomachines’) was destroyed when the democratic insurgents rammed four ore freighters into the Commonwealth’s capital on Titan. In the past terraforming planets such as Mars, Venus or even Mercury took a decade or two at worst, and required only a fraction of normal efforts.

For example all that was required to change Mercury into an Earth-like world was to unleash the World Forge nanites to start converting the atmosphere and build some large space mirror to shield the world from at least some of the Sun’s light. Fifteen years in you could start sending colonists. Sectors were full of Earth-like Garden Worlds. But since the World Forge was lost, those planets were valuable. Much more than even the largest ships.

Tiriel showed Christopher an estimation of how much he was going to earn if the fleet ever gets back to a friendly port - without losing Pontifex system to the Corporation or the Discord. After adding the money from the recovered ships and his share in the colonizable planets in the system, he was going to become a billionaire. Without counting any potential exotech discoveries.

All of that, of course, if they returned alive. Which was going to be complicated. It was made immediately obvious when the probes Tiriel sent down to Pontifex-II vanished.

“Tendrik, any ideas?” She asked. Since they were going to do something that could potentially warrant a response - namely sending something down instead of passively scanning the surface - everyone was in their combat positions aboard the Cutlass.

“Nope.” The cyborg replied while shaking his head. “The computers have no idea what happened. The probes just… disappeared. Cycle? Dryad?” Two more negative answers, both through the network. One enthusiastic, and one passive.

“Wonderful.” Christopher commented. “Why can’t we get a simple mission for once?”

“Did you really expect anything to be simple after angels started to talk to you about a grave danger to all of Mankind?” Tiriel replied without taking her eyes off the display. “Could be much worse, all things considered.” Tiriel was right. Like she used to be.

“Great riposte.” Christopher said. “I’d prefer some answers or an idea on what to do right now. Because I don’t think that trying to land a manned mission on the planet is a good idea.”

“Wait, what the…” Tendrik suddenly jolted up in his seat. “Errr… this is… what in the name of the First Programmer...” If Christopher was ever going to mellow down on his self-imposed restrictions for meta-empathy usage, it would be in moments like these.

“Teeendrik.” He urged the cyborg. “What is it?”

“We just got a message.” Tendrik replied. “From the planet. Guild’s communication protocols, correct encryption. But it’s just a single word.”

COME.

Apparently caps lock writing can be intimidating, at least in correct circumstances.