Chapter 26 - Traitor

Ebonshear Outskirts - Nightfall

Kayae sat quietly against one of the wagon wheels on the interior of the encirclement. Around her, the other slaves were quickly finishing preparations for bed. Kuritn was tending to the cooking fire while Suavi was curled up on her lap, burying her face between her legs. Suavi had refused to say anything about what happened between her and Simon and why the wagon had been covered in ice. Instead, she simply returned to her dog form and jumped into Kayae's arms. She'd been there ever since they arrived.

Simon sat alone on top of the lead wagon's driver seat, quietly observing the gatehouse barely a kilometer from their current position. They had arrived just after nightfall, but the gates had already closed. According to the guardsmen present, the gates were closed early due to bandits in the surrounding area and would not be reopened until dawn. Dozens of merchants sat in front of the gate, forming a more or less orderly line. They had arrived during the day but did not make it inside before was given to close the gates.

Soft mumblings could be heard from their direction as the various merchants traveled from caravan to caravan. Some sought out supplies they needed for an extra night outside of town, while others tried to get a jump on the competition by buying items before they could be taxed by the Baron. A few merchants had tried to approach Simon's caravan, but a single look from the figure clad in black and red armor had caused them to scurry away. A brave merchant had steeled himself and approached despite the figure's cold gaze, only to return with a wet spot in his trousers.

No one tried to approach after that.

Cowards.

Simon sighed and stared up into the sky, recalling the day's events. The trip had been uneventful after Suavi's discovery and they had made remarkable time along the main road. Thanks to his earlier proclamation, a journey that usually would have taken two or three days had been done in just one. The horses were exhausted and the villagers-cum-slaves were sore, but he didn't care.

Simon spit onto the ground, I can't wait for this mess to be over. I'm a soldier, not a slaver. Nor am I a bodyguard or a damned babysitter. His eyes shifted over towards the small girl sleeping against a wagon wheel and the tiny dog in her lap and shook his head. Liar. You fight for those you've lost and for those you can yet save.

Simon scoffed to himself, “Those I have lost and those I can yet save? What bullshit. In the end, I couldn't even save myself, my friends, or even the woman I loved.”

The images of his fallen comrades' faces flashed across his eyes.

Ironwood, deceased. Executed for Treason after requesting aid from the Independent Planet of Mars without approval. high command hadn't been too happy to hear that Mars had reconstructed Simon's body and, as such, had the technology required to create their own breed of super soldiers, regardless of the fact they'd never be able to complete such a thing without the assistance of a V.A.I.A. like Artoria. They would certainly try, but Artoria had entirely resisted any attempts at accessing her source code or data banks, much to the Mars Council's annoyance.

Jack and Quincey had been completely evaporated after they took an annihilator's breath head-on, while Arthur had been killed by an ally after they panicked and dropped a white phosphorus grenade next to him. Unlike Jack and Quincy, Arthur was just an average human. He had died screaming. In his final moments, he had begged Simon to kill him just to stop the pain, so he did. A single shot was all it took, and it was over in an instant, but for Simon, that instant would replay in his mind for the rest of his life.

Abraham's end was the worst of them. He had died screaming as well, but unlike Arthur, he wasn't a human. He was a second-generation S.A.G.E.S. The only difference between himself and Abraham was that he was a first-generation S.A.G.E.S. while Abraham was of the second generation. According to the medical staff that did the autopsy on Abraham's body, or at least the metal sludge that had once been his body, he had died from a severe case of sudden onset chronic nanite rejection syndrome. None of the staff could explain why it happened when it did. It wasn't until they arrived back on earth that they would learn the truth.

Simon's face contorted into a frown as he recalled that moment and the temperature around him started to drop, his armor frosting over. A thin mist surrounded him as the ice melted and refrozen, creating a fog-like effect around his body. They had been betrayed by one of their own.

Daniel. Tero.

Daniel Tero, Head Researcher of Cybernetics and the Synthetically Altered and Genetically Enhanced Soldiers or S.A.G.E.S. project. According to Ironwood, the project had initially been named Bulwark, but Tero had apparently taken a liking to the acronym S.A.G.E.S. and made up some bullshit name and reason to justify renaming the project.

The S.A.G.E.S. project had been his life's work even before the war's outbreak. No one seemed to know Tero's exact age, not even Artoria, but records found indicated a man matching his description and name had been born at the tail end of the 23rd century. If that man was indeed him, he was well over a thousand years old at this point. High command, however, had officially rejected this fact on the surface but Simon believed it. The things Tero accomplished could not have been done by someone who had lived a mere two hundred years as his official record stated.

The program had originally been deemed as too radical or too fantastical and a crime against humanity or an affront to god. Simon had laughed at the time when Ironwood told him about that last one. That had been before religious practitioners were either re-educated or executed. Despite the practice of religion having been banned for over five hundred years at this point.

Regardless, as the war waged on, more and more systems were lost until only four of seventeen colonies humanity had settled remained. Left without any other options, high command greenlit the project and the good doctor went to work immediately with such zeal one of the commanders had commented that he looked like a mad scientist trying to defy a god or perhaps become one.

Not far from the truth, In all honesty.

The program consisted of multiple different stages. Each stage more complex and deadly than the previous. Original estimations of the project's success rate placed the number of test subjects that would survive past the final stage at roughly 50%. A startlingly low percentage to be sure but a percentage that high command was more than willing to accept in order to obtain some much-needed military assets. After all, it's not like they or their children would be the ones undergoing the hellish program.

During the first stage, a genetic sample was selected from the most decorated soldiers humanity had to offer, regardless of whether or not they were alive or dead. Obviously, high command had deemed themselves the most decorated along with their closest supporters.

Of the original two hundred soldiers set to be created, only one of them had come from someone outside of the high command's inner circle. This sole token sample was selected after much internal debate and a significant amount of external pressure to have at least one sample created from someone outside of their own inner circle.

Eventually, the council decided on selecting the sample submitted by the then Lieutenant Commander J. M. Ironwood after his triumphant return from the defense of Alpha Centauri where a previously undetected enemy fleet had managed to slip past the system's deep space detection array and had begun indiscriminately attacking outer ring colonies. That sample was used to create subject 1431 after significant genetic alterations.

After the samples were selected, a team of thousands of scientists mapped the sample's genome and set about recreating it from the ground up. Instead of being simply edited, an entirely new strain of D.N.A. was created from scratch with the sample template as a sort of blueprint. Numerous edits were added to increase the soldier's physical endurance, intelligence, reaction speed, and other various traits deemed required for the soldier's survival against the horrors humanity was currently facing.

Top among these alterations was genetic sterilization of both sexes and the complete removal of the body's immune system to prevent the rejection of the various cybernetic implants added to the soldier's body. Instead of an immune system, billions of nanites would be introduced to the subject's body after V.A.I.A synchronization and tasked with that responsibility, among others.

Once this lengthy process was finished, the project moved on to stage three. The D.N.A. was implanted into a donor egg and placed into an artificial womb filled with an artificial amniotic fluid that only Tero himself knew how to create. According to him, the egg's source didn't matter, only that it was human in origin and that the donor's D.N.A. had been completely removed. In contrast to the average human growth cycle of nine months, the eggs in the artificial vitae wombs took a total of twenty-six months to reach the birthing stage. Unfortunately, only a hundred and forty-seven of the newly born soldiers were deemed acceptable and moved onto the next stage while the rest were incinerated by the mad scientist.

Stage four began as soon as the subjects completed the third stage and were deemed acceptable by the good doctor. In this stage, a small incision was made at the base of a subject's skull while they were still interred within the vitae womb before a wirelessly powered high bandwidth data transceiver was inserted into the newly created opening and placed deep within the subject's cerebellum. This transceiver would be replaced by a much larger internally powered quantum computer capable of housing the subject's assigned V.A.I.A. partner in their entirety rather than simply providing a high-speed uplink to a remote server that housed the A.I.

Again high command intervened, not wanting to allow their newly created toys to be completely self-dependent and unreliant on systems firmly within their own control. It was only after multiple threats from Doctor Tero and several of the more important staff to abandon the project if they didn't approve of this supplemental procedure that they finally relented. Officially the uplink was replaced out of necessity but in reality, Tero's pride wouldn't allow his name to be tied to what he saw as an inferior creation. Unfortunately, another twelve of the test subjects would die from internal hemorrhaging of the brain caused by severe sensory overload before the scientists realized what was causing the issue.

Things progressed rapidly after that. The freshly birthed subjects were taken to a special training facility and subjected to extreme conditions. By their tenth birthday, only a hundred and ten survived. The number would fall again after the trillions of prepared nanites were introduced into the children's bodies. Dozens died in the first few days. Their corpses morphed into a metallic black goo that spread across the cleanroom's walls, ceilings, and floors. None of the children had names at this point and none would receive graves.

Only the numbers of the artificial womb they had been birthed from would be recorded in a ledger listing failed subjects. As soon as the risk of rejection passed, various cybernetic systems designed by Tero were implanted into the surviving children. All done under the careful supervision of a high command unwilling to permit even the slightest deviation from the project's goals after the loss of two more colonies.

Again more children died, but the program continued on despite the complaints of some of the members of high command. Eventually, the project reached its final and most deadly stage. A stage that would later be deemed far too costly and cut entirely from the program against Tero's wishes. Of the seventy-odd children that entered, only one emerged alive and relatively sane.

The stage began by deactivating the self-regeneration subsystem included in the nanites base protocols. After that, the subject's spinal column was severed at the base of the skull to prevent the subject from moving. Normally such an action would kill the subject, but thanks to the nanite's emergency subsystems, the body was kept alive by the machines circulating the blood and introducing oxygen to the cells manually. Unfortunately, the nanites protocols also allowed the subject to feel their entire body despite being unable to move. Apparently, this protocol could have been deactivated as well, but according to Tero, the subject's chances of surviving would be improbable.

In a project with an already abysmal survival rate, high command had correctly translated improbable to mean zero. Thus the protocol was to remain active for the duration of the stage.

The subject was placed on top of a specially constructed table complete with a nightmarish assortment of surgical tools. First, a laser was used to cut the subject's skin from their muscles. It would be replaced later by a synthetic material that resembles human skin in appearance and texture but was otherwise unlike the subject's former skin. The material was highly resistant to punctures, cuts, abrasions, and other minor wounds that would normally breach the skin's surface. In addition, it was resistant to extreme changes in temperature and mildly corrosive acids.

Once the skin was removed, the muscles were cut into sections to expose the bones beneath. These muscles would later be restored via the nanites regeneration subsystem and reinforced with carbon nanotubes. Eventually, the muscle's entire mass would be replaced with the nanotubes, but that process would gradually occur over a time period of several years to further reduce the risk of the subject's premature expiration. The process would be excruciating and leave the subject in a state of constant pain until its completion, but Tero and high command thought it was a small price to pay for salvation. After all, they weren't the ones who had to be in constant pain for a hundred years.

With the muscles cut away, the subject's bones would be removed section by section and replaced by a skeleton entirely made up of metallic alloy similar in weight and strength to tungsten. However, the alloy was far more resistant to fractures and shear forces. This change allowed the material to survive the harsh treatment that would have completely shattered or otherwise destroyed regular tungsten. Due to the relatively high electroconductivity of the composition of the new skeleton, the bones were then coated in a thin membrane made from microscopic particles of quartz and polyvinyl chloride (P.V.C.). As this process would altogether remove the subject's bone marrow and thus stopping the creation of red blood cells. A new organ that was responsible for their creation was implanted next to the subject's heart.

The heart was then removed and replaced with a cybernetic implant that aided the nanites in circulation around the body. This artificial heart would also serve as the housing for the subject's primary power source, a miniature thorium-fueled slow-burn traveling wave reactor. A secondary power source, a Mark V Poitier class cold-fusion rector complete with a high-density capacitor, would be implanted later to the right of the primary power source. These two power sources combined with the Mark III Halsey bio-reactor capable of sustaining bodily functions and creating fissile material from non-fissile substances that replaced the subject's digestive tract would go on to power the subject's biological body and various cybernetic augmentations that had been powered via wireless charging stations embedded within the complex floor until this point.

While the subject's skull was removed for skeletal replacement, the brain was altered as well. The alterations made allowed the subject's mind to accurately adapt to the changes happening rapidly in their body. Nanites were once again used to completely restructure the subject's nervous system from the ground up. By the time this was completed, the subject's thought processes would be increased anywhere between twenty and fifty times, according to previous experiments on other volunteers. However, a mistake went unobserved by the scientists in charge of this process, causing the subject's pain sensitivity to be increased several hundred times.

The mistake ultimately caused all but one of the still surviving subjects to be driven completely insane or rendered brain-dead. Tero discovered that fact after the only surviving subject, 1431, had successfully completed the final stage. The doctor was left briefly in a state of shock that someone, no matter how augmented or genetically engineered, had managed to survive something like that. The nanites were swiftly reprogrammed and the error was corrected, returning the patient's pain sensitivity back to normal, but the damage had already been done.

Despite starting with over seventy subjects, the final stage had killed all but one of them. High command immediately put a halt to the project. All embryos growing in the artificial wombs prepared for use in a second batch were incinerated while investigators were sent in to find out what had gone so wrong with the project. Dr. Tero was swiftly removed from the program and discharged from the military in disgrace.

The program would continue on without him and without the final stage that had claimed so many lives. Due to the absence of his involvement, many of the scientists viewed the subsequent iterations of the project as pale imitations created by fools who didn't understand that progress required sacrifice. An alternate amniotic fluid was developed to replace the secret formula only known to Tero. This new fluid was vastly inferior to its predecessor. Where a subject could go from fertilization to birth in a mere twenty-seven months, the new fluid required a staggering sixty-five months to reach the same maturity stage. This fluid was also prone to metabolic degradation that would introduce various undesirable mutations in the growing subjects, further reducing their already abysmal success rate to a mere fourteen percent.

Attempts were made to recreate the former substance but as with all other projects dedicated to recreating the various pieces of technology only known to the former project director, all attempts would be unsuccessful. The remaining fully operational V.A.I.A's created prior to the good doctor's departure were bonded to the inferior second generation while a second project was started to create a new generation of V.A.I.A's without Teros involvement.

Centuries later, after the fall of Saturn, the Independent Planet of Mars would offer to assist in the project's completion armed with the fragmented knowledge they had obtained from repairing Simon's battered body after the battle. Their assistance was accepted and the combined group of scientists eventually succeded several decades later and finally began the creation of the third generation S.A.G.E.S. While these third-generation soldiers were vastly inferior in all respects to the first and even second generation, they had the advantage of being mass-producible as various technological and procedural improvements had been made over the centuries.

The process of creating a third-generation S.A.G.E.S had been streamlined. Where once the process took nearly two decades to complete, it now only took five and they could be created in large numbers. Alterations were made to the subject's genetic code to rapidly increase their growth rate at the expense of life expectancy. A trade-off all present were more than happy to make. Advanced training programs were scrapped altogether in favor of basic military training designed for their augmented physiques while a motor control override system was implanted to allow the subjects V.A.I.A to control the body in combat operations.

Tero had disappeared after being removed from the project. Several assassination squads were sent out to find and kill him, but none of them returned. After that, reconnaissance squads were sent, but no trace of Tero or the assassins was ever found. Eventually, high command decided to wash their hands of the whole affair and called the squads back to defend the sol system. The mad scientist was never seen again until the fall of mars.

Abraham had been standing beside Simon observing the defense of mars when he suddenly collapsed screaming in pain. Simon had been forced to watch as Abraham's body dissolved from the inside out. Due to the nanite's regenerative capabilities, none of Simon's attacks could kill the screaming man and just added to the pain, so he watched his friend dissolve into a puddle of metallic goo. Sitting on top of a behemoth off in the distance, Simon saw a lone man grinning widely while watching the scene unfold.

Despite Simon's best efforts, none of his shots managed to reach the man before he disappeared from view. Mars fell quickly after that. It wasn't until they arrived on Earth that Artoria explained what had happened.

According to her, the nanites in Abraham had been reprogrammed remotely using a previously unavailable administrative access code hidden deep within the nanite's source code. The same grisly fate would have befallen him if Artoria hadn't managed to react in time and block access. Such a thing wouldn't have been possible had Artoria not been sentient and had Ironwood not ordered the scientists on Mars at gunpoint to remove the limiters imposed on her.

The two men would not meet each other again until the battle of Moscow years later.

Simon let out a loud sigh after noticing the tea he had been drinking had frozen over.

That's been happening a lot lately, it seems.

He looks up at the sky while wondering how long he had been recalling past events and notices the sun rising on the horizon.