“s- to itto it!”
Bad long range comms. No connection from above, with the FoF only populated here on the ground and relayed a dozen times.
The rains had come in sheets yet again.
The occasional rumble of thunder still rolled across the settling mud, the flooded mazes of sandy trenchworks.
Breakfast on the Savannah.
A strange name for a planet, gifted to it decades, if not centuries ago in the first waves of A.I. colonization across the stars. Some planets had been seeded with enormous terraformer machines – some centuries before any humans ever arrived to breathe the new atmosphere. An approximation of Earth air.
Chock full of nitrogen and oxygen.
Great plains, stretching across the horizon, settled flat under the roiling grey clouds. Reaching distantly until grey became dangerously darker shades of black in wide swaths. Fat drops fell in torrents, much bigger than on Earth due to increased atmospheric humidity. The survivors spotted each cloudburst opening up and hanging in odd new shapes, drifting across the skies. Some of the holes in the clouds were various weapons firing, punching up or down through the grey ceiling with intense heat or force.
The last of the fighting up in orbit, chasing away the gods.
Above, GRAS The Sun was perched. Just below the helpful cloud cover, the ancient, centuries-old command carrier was hanging above the lines of trenches dug into the soft, sandy, muddy soil below, each trenchline interspersed here and there with rock and loam. It held there, the grey carrier casting long shadows off to the East even through heavy clouds as the planet passed in a unique orbit around the local red giant. The same star that now cast the familiar soft reddish-tinted light across the yellow and green grasses, seeded via airborne grid succession so long ago. The one clue that nature was fabricated here, so far from home: Forests and grasses growing in checkerboard patterns across the planet. Denser near the impact points.
Savannah’s local solar giant was just close enough to allow Earthling flora and fauna to thrive.
The battle had finally concluded – just before the most recent deluge of water, and these last rumbles of thunder and lightning split the sky in bright forked flashes of plasma. Most traced their way into The Sun, closest to the clouds, where the roiling coils of angry electricity from the cloudy skies connected with ionized plasma. They spiderwebbed across the shielding like a plasma globe as it absorbed the free energy. Saved on fusion fuel and shield projector munitions.
It was a good show for those left alive, at least.
Wreckage and craters of varying sizes spanned the field below, some made by Chayots – those suits of bulky power armor, more like walking artillery than anything else. Draped all in varying religious iconographies, upon the white and red. Others hailed from large guns or air support from either side, that flattened trenches and buried bodies, weapons, and machinery in torrents of earth.
Casualties had been heavy, of course.
They always were, whenever The Resistance was pulled into a direct or head-on ground engagement with the Guardians of Destiny or The Black Armada. The main rebel fighting force on the ground consisted of Class 2 A.I. Combat Drones, mass manufactured and redesigned since the 2050’s, supported by what few soldiers they had within The Blue Flame. As G.O.D. veterans amongst the Resistance were becoming rarer with time outside most of the immortals amongst the Leadership, it was all about trying to sacrifice automatons in place of rarer Human lives. But often it felt like they were just providing target practice for the hardened and combat-experienced enemy. Across the miserable battlefield, the trenches lay sodden with muddy water up to the knees, with those lacking proper powered armor or sealed inner bodysuits grimacing at the sucking feel of cold water seeping through layers of combat skin.
Even the luckiest still had rank feet and armpits after days inside their armor.
The hybrid supersoldier, One, and his shared-body Class 7 partner A.I. Alfred were leading the recovery efforts, traversing the foremost lines of the battlefront. They made up one section of an enormous search and rescue line – a wide, spread-out formation of black-garbed Blue Flame Shocktroopers leading and directing attached squads of the simple bipedal combat drones. Each of these squads was in turn managed and directed themselves by networks of higher Class 5 and 6 A.I. combatants across the battlenet via a dozen relays from the fleet up top somewhere.
Every so often, a flare would ascend into the sky, a dull red on red glow hanging above locations where a survivor, or a corpse to be recovered had been located. The more powerful Class 5 and 6 Artificial Intelligences, plentiful within the Resistance, led these search teams by analyzing extremely complex recreations of the battlenet FoF history.
Agatha light transports buzzed to and fro, scavenging those recovered by the drone squads and sailing them upward even higher to the carrier hanging in the sky for medical treatments, amputations, prosthetics, or cremation.
Aggies in endless lines like bees.
It was rather depressing that most Resistance ships had mandatory specialists in cybernetic prosthetics aboard. Another side effect of fighting for freedom whilst relying on mostly mechanical armies. Resistance soldiers commonly rejoined the fight resembling their drone comrades, sans the advanced genetic engineering and cloning facilities the immortals could rely upon in the other two factions of “The Big Three.”
I know my colleagues are still working on analysis for this grid. Would you like me to toggle on the Friend or Foe network for our HUD?
Alfred was trying to be helpful. The thought came and went faster than any voice could move through mere soundwaves, but where the A.I. was linked via technology to the synapses of the grey matter, there were still noticeable milliseconds of consideration.
“Sure. But maybe just flip it on and off again before it fully populates. Might be a bit much for the Class 6 team to add to the calculations all at once.”
They could hear the battlenet chatter internally, as the order was relayed across Alfred’s executive administrator control of the various comms and networks. Each soldier and drone in the long line checked their own FoF pings. Then came various optics checks, as most helmets, visors, headgear, and even weapon scopes were designed universally centuries ago to pick up and mark the pings and images of both friend and foe, standardized as they often were. Then, they’d be shared across the friendly battlenet, interpreted by middle to higher Class A.I., then tagged appropriately as a visual marker across the FoF system and battlenet in close to real time to keep tabs on things in the chaos of war.
The staggered line paused to take in a slow-scan visual sweep of the battlefield ahead.
Huge amounts of raw uncompressed data gave One a slight migraine as Al pulled it all in. Alfred, as the only Class 7 Artificial Intelligence in existence, would shoulder the larger burden of analyzing the visual sweep. Wide as it was, it consisted of real time audio, video, and FoF loads from hundreds of individual units. It just made sense – as he was the only high Class A.I. on the ground, most bound to warships or Installations with enough storage or network load.
Usually the A.I. was kind enough to take the excess time to compress everything or derez what he could to avoid such trifles as headaches.
Usually aboard ships or nearer to networked civilization he’d also take advantage of larger networks with more space for multiple instances of Virtual OS, or tens of thousands of Terabytes of RAM. Plus any other extra computing power he could find, to avoid putting the full weight of each feed onto his cyborg partner’s grey matter half-brain and many optical nerves. Each visual feed alone was 600 Megapixels or so.
But at the moment, there could be survivors out there who needed immediate help. Small sacrifices like migraines were fine.
Small green squares and outlines shimmered into view around each form trudging across trench lines, far off to the right and left. A handful of more greyed out reds and greens popped up here and there, the dead which were already accounted for.
York.
Gregor.
Sanders.
The long-limbed Exoskeleton of the last was just barely visible as a green triangle, a click or two West.
Survivors seeking survivors.
The FoF slowly began to populate the surrounding ravaged landscape across the HUD more, as suit vitals, various camera equipment, and facial and genetic IDs began compiling more clearly within the battlenet. Alfred was leading the charge from here, backed up by the networks of lower class artificial intelligences, most manning the scores of simple drones that interspersed themselves between the flesh and blood members of the Guardian Resistance Army. Just barely aware enough at Class 2 or 3 or with the computing help of other higher Class cousins to believe in what they were fighting for.
As the data came in, more green and red outlines filled in, some silhouetting a fraction of the thousands of bodies and war machines haphazardly abandoned or gutted across this no-man’s land. To be turned greyish reds or greens upon confirmation of status. Treaties and accords signed across the three factions dictated the return of remains and a confirmation of death, to be twisted into propaganda by the immortals’ nefariously untrue news machines.
At least the folks out here in The Neutral Territories appreciated their protection from immortals or pirates, if not the booming economy. The God Resistance Army wasn’t The Junk & Rumblers Guild, though, despite what was happening all around them.
This wasn’t about profit. Never was. It was about the yoke of those who lived forever. Means, and ends.
The superweapon made a grimace, taking a step over the mangled carcass of a Seraph suit. The chest cavity of the lanky “Rabbit” or “Angel” was forced outwards, some sort of armor piercing explosive round that had buried a clean hole inside the power armor’s chassis where the pilot was, which had then detonated outwards from inside the hapless pilot’s torso. It was surprisingly clean from the fresh rains, the helmet and lanky limbs remaining relatively intact where it lay half buried in the mud. The glistening remainder of the empty torso, filled with pools of fresh rainwater, was open to the sky where the armor had failed from within. Scooped clean, blasted out.
Jagged fingers of shredded metal, ripped gel layers, and broken ceramic plating reached up towards the stormy skies from the edges of the blast hole radius.
The greyish red outline marked it simply enough.
“Seraph.”
The enemy. The oppressor. The antagonist.
Ten feet away, a square green outline, which changed to outline the body – wreathed around the black armor of a Resistance Shock Trooper. She was laying amidst a scattering of highlighted gray-green combat drones. The drones were beyond saving, of course, but the partners moved as one to the corpse, gently flipping it over.
No vitals.
A clean entry wound clipping the collarbone, just above the breastplate. Looked like she had crawled about fifteen feet back down the side of the trench, seeking shelter and medical help, before she expired.
Private Angela Clarke, 3rd Battalion, Home Defense Fleet.
Compulsion filled the superweapon, with a solemn acceptance rising from the artificial A.I. construct sharing the body. Fingers pressed the lock for the vacuum seal under the woman’s chin, only to find that the helmet’s pressurized space had already failed, likely up the neckline where the helmet and body armor seals met around the neck.
There was no familiar hiss.
The helmet came away with hardly a pull, not that the two might find such a feat of strength difficult anyways. There were black synthetic muscle fibres woven in tandem with the organic ones, and additional pneumatics powered by the cold fusion generator built into and around their mostly mechanically-armored spinal column.
The dark face was drained of blood, but unblemished at first glance. Her black hair was combat braided in tight lines, several braids pulling away and falling across the face as the helm came free. Single braids were dyed greens and blues. Blue was a favorite amongst the Resistance, due to the traditions of The Blue Flame. Those G.O.D. Shocktroopers and other Army or Navy folk that had joined the God Resistance Army Leaders in the initial rebellion all those years ago, becoming the armed wing of the Resistance. Another grimace came to the face of the pair as partially coagulated blood dribbled from the mouth when the armor’s neck cushion padding slowly moved away, slumping the head. Clearly the trachea or esophagus had been punctured from the angle of the collarbone wound. The unblemished face quickly became marred with red.
Death via drowning in one’s own internal fluids was never a good way to go.
They remained there for a moment, kneeling down by the body and gently moving it into a more formal position, despite the damage to the upper breastplate.
Called her in for the casualty reports. After the first sweep for our MIA and wounded, I’ll have crews solely on body recovery.
A mental flash of acceptance and appreciation was all Alfred needed to continue working. The innocent childlike inner voice of the A.I. went quiet, reducing himself to a murmur at the back of the skull as he bustled across the battlenet, managing hundreds even as he was here in this moment, simultaneously.
Her dark skin, drained of blood, was now trapped in an expression of shock, the mouth parted slightly, the eyes glazed over and staring off towards her desired destination before she passed. The hematic knuckle plates shifted slowly, reducing their thickness as the microscopic colony of machines pulled iron and cells into capillaries to offer more dexterity in lieu of thicker protections.
X-1 gently arranged each black braid as best they could, laying them out in a halo around the face beneath the Shocktrooper’s head. An act of respect for a fallen comrade, no matter how insignificant. Cleaned up the face, closed the eyes. When the recovery crews began their grisly task of collecting bodies and salvage from the battlefield in later sweeps as per protocol, she would be a small piece of grace amidst the grim chaos and aftermath of war. And hopefully they’d help avoid traumatizing whoever recovered her body as best they could.
Committed the name to memory, Alfred adding it to the list filed away in memory of those that Xex Project One had known, amongst the other fallen Resistance members who had joined them in fighting for freedom – the ones that weren’t around to tell their own stories.
The partners returned to their feet with the soft squelching and scraping of sand-laden mud.
Moved on to catch up with the long line of drones and soldiers seeking survivors.
The battle had raged for nigh on a week before this new silence. The wreck of a battlecruiser downed early on in the battle loomed up a few kilometres to the side. Even now, the tiny glowing lights of welding, torching, and other salvage crews dotted the silvery, already rusting form as they cannibalized the G.O.D. starship where it had fallen from the sky. The goal was to take it to the nearest allied industry town. The God Resistance Army had neither the time nor the resources of their enemies, of course. Everything that could be reclaimed and reused even as local aid or favor was fair game, especially clean steel and ship parts. It was merely the solemn reality of those warring for true democracy against mightier foes dedicated to their destruction. Rusty ships like it were unique in Central Universe, as most warships such as battlecruisers spent a majority of their time in space without oxygen to oxidize the hull. It was either very old, having seen lots of atmospheric action, or Breakfast On The Savannah’s moisture was damn fast.
Scorched remains of a Chayot, here.
Blown apart husk of a Harbinger, there.
Drones in the hundreds, looking like shattered grey mannequins or marionettes amidst the rise and fall of trenches and slight hills. Some missing limbs, others blackened and pock-marked from explosions. The Class 2 drones still active, but too damaged to move well would be recovered, refurbished and repaired in the field of course, to ease strain on the endless factory lines of replacements back home on Petronova, where A.I. software was the most expensive component requiring larger and better armored storage.
Corpses were everywhere, more and more now all outlined in green, with the A.I.s shuffling and reorganizing the battlenet as final positions were adjusted. The goal was to match what they knew in the history they were compiling already, with current locations of corpses, machinery, and the various units that shifted and fluctuated across the plains and battlefields like fallen chess pieces. Enemy Shocktroopers, Seraphs, or others in white Guardian garb lay unlabelled aside from unit tags amongst the dead friendlies.
X-1 stopped at the blackened shell of a Betty. The VTOL was buried in a small crater, the nose cone crumpled and forced backwards into the cockpit itself. A single green outline shimmered into view, a lone arm laying, severed, atop the remains of the dashboard.
Pilot Carter Hernandez, GRAS The Sun, Home Defense Fleet.
Here was where they had made planetfall, arriving late to the party. The partners had made it back to where the fight on the ground had started for them. Remembered the crash. The rumble and chop of thrusters and rotors, the punctuation of thundering explosions and flak guns.
A new explosion, the sound of sucking and tearing air, then the whining of the fall. The screams and prayers of the soldiers strapped in alongside them.
They moved to the hole near the rear, where an anti-aircraft gun had ripped open the armor and chassis, forcing metal inwards towards the precious cargo of more vulnerable flesh and blood soldiers inside.
Alfred had proven himself invaluable, as always – when the organic half had woken post-crash, as the fusion generator was already humming frantically within their spinal cavity, where the hematic plating and spinal armoring jutted awkwardly even through the skin-tight pressure suit. Lazy cobwebs of tiny machines had bulked up the form, locking up joints and organs with Hematic material and ensuring at least a single survivor emerged from this grisly crash. The blue plasma shielding had been churning, inflated to the maximum thickness of shell Alfred could muster from the cold fusion engine.
Everyone else was KIA.
DOA.
Emerged to a sea of gunfire through this same open hole. Alfred was already trying to rally nearby fighters and forces for a rescue over the battlenet.
After that, the scene was all too familiar.
The Xex Project Sibling swept their gaze across the still forms within, peering back in through the hole. Most of the bodies were still intact, blunt force trauma being the prime cause of death for the majority without lockable joints and internal nanite swarms to heal them.
A scurrying and skittering then, the clicking and soft crunching of something in the dark interior. Thermals in the cybernetic right eye kicked on.
The severed arm was not from the crash…
A fork of lightning connected with the carrier’s plasma shielding up above through the downpour, illuminating the interior of the Betty in a mix of white and red light.
It lit up the crested tan form currently savaging one of the bodies.
The FoF tag flashed red instantly, Alfred tagging the Beast where it fed upon the fallen.
Back up. Hasn’t noticed us yet.
Alfred’s silent warning inside his head.
He did as Alfred instructed, with the plasma shielding winding up automatically to enemy proximity as a sympathetic nervous system subroutine protocol before Alfred could stop it. The soft whining startup of the fusion reactor drew the unfortunate attention of the hungry quadruped from the discovered food source within the Betty.
Beasts were the bastardized, asexually reproducing offspring of Xex Project 2: “Ultimate.” Acid glands, armored tan carapace, crested head, sharp claws, fangs, all of it. They were feral animals, these days used mostly by The Black Armada as genetically spliced bioweapons, to deny territory as a hazard or overwhelm front lines in swarms, all without the sentience, intelligence or more humanoid bipedal form of their original progenitor. Dumping them from low altitude in swarms and deploying pheromones to lure them where one wanted was most of the work. Beasts were largely hungry, carnivorous monsters that did nothing but hunt, eat, and asexually breed – by injecting a self-fertilized egg via the bladed, segmented tail into any fleshy meat body, living or dead, that could sustain a hatchling’s fresh hearty appetite within 24-48 hours. Cannibalism was common in invasive wild populations, as was the extinction of local fauna, to ecosystems of mostly nothing but flora and cannibal Beasts, at least without quick human intervention. Beasts were known to kill for pleasure or sport like a cat, just to stockpile rotting bodies in a hidden hive or den for later reproduction as a pack leader during times of plentiful food. The base genetic code might have started as Human with X-2, but the myriad of other traits from various animals, plants, and homebrew gene splicing of decades before made it really hard to tell sometimes.
Another sorrowful legacy of the ever-ongoing Xex Project.
The creature turned, the tan crest slightly reflecting the gore that caked the long, sharp, needle-like fangs that jutted from the roof of the mouth and hanging jaw sans a muzzle. That same jaw was currently unhinged for feeding. Yellow eyes swiveled, and the soft chitinous clicking of the prehensile, segmented, armored tail came to ear. It moved faster than one could blink, three-clawed limbs extended outwards as might a cat spread itself out to latch onto a climbing post. The tan insectoid carapace was matted with red as the exoskeleton coiled, then sprung, bladed tail jutting out towards the two.
Wrist blades slid from their boxy Hazard Gear sheaths, sharpening between thin whetstone mechanisms as they extended from the cavities of the rail-attached equipment at a thought. The slightly curving tips of the twin blades hummed with power, became coated in a bright whitish blue field of hot torching plasma The two stubby gun barrels mounted on each side of each blade flared to life.
One began spewing white-hot bolts of plasma into the cavity of the Betty towards the lunging creature with all four barrels.
What if One had been too late to prevent it from implanting eggs in these corpses? It wasn’t uncommon for soldiers to stumble upon survivors within caches of gathered dead, only for the soft, hermaphroditically fertilized eggs to hatch from within their unconscious bodies and attack even in the larval stages of the first couple molts within the host. Recovering bodies from mass graves like this was just as dangerous on some planets with wild populations.
Freshly birthed beasts, emerging from friends and comrades to feed and begin the cycle again, was a frequent cause of trauma for many Central Universe veterans.
There was a second movement from within, and the beast was snatched from where it was currently hurtling itself through the air. The last glimpse of the red-outlined form was a bladed syringe tipped tail, razor-sharp claws, and needle-fangs, all extended, sulfuric acid beading at the glands in each palm and underneath the long, slender, air-tasting tongue lashing about.
Then the Fringe was upon it.
The shadows coiled, and a second flash of lightning illuminated the two screeching forms inside the downed transport, echoing across the battlefield.
The shadowy black form, asymmetrical, incorporeal, and flickering, was making short work of the beast, sinking long flayer claws into the chitin again and again as if the semi-bulletproof kevlar-infused chitin was no more than paper mache. Gangly and terrifying, it continued swiping and slashing at the beast long after it stopped moving, eviscerating the tan-carapace into ribbons of sickly greenish-yellow blood and glistening red and purple muscle. The horrendous nightmarish screeching stopped, as the Fringe turned towards the intruder.
X-1 had fought alongside Fringes before. The ghosts of the fallen, some said – twisted and distorted into this reality by the strange magicks and secret rituals of Shifter’s Starcallers. A secret he and his small cabal of followers still kept, despite joining the rebels more openly in recent years. Rumors and gossip abounded, ranging from Fringes and other dark summoned creatures being souls from the universe condensed into Xex Project Three, to the haunting vengeful phantoms of fallen Resistance freedom fighters.
Strange times made for stranger allies. It was no less terrifying to be fighting as the ally of such forcefully conscripted ghosts, driven by vengeance via sinister dark energy or antimatter influenced rituals.
It moved, and on pure instinct X-1 and Alfred raised an arm, levelling their own “ghostly” plasma-inflamed wrist blade and gun-barrels at the creature. But the freakishly tall, distorted bipedal form stopped at the hole for some reason as they stepped backwards slowly away from it, long spindly digits tipped with terrifying flexing claws. It hung there for a half second, flickering, swaying, blinking, and fizzing in and out of existence in swaths.
The jaw dropped, and the gangly form let out a deep sigh.
As if elated.
The dimly glowing Soul Cores of the fallen inside the Betty burbled out from within them, soft masses like a transparent white slime lifting away from their corpses and pulling inwards into the Fringe. Normally Soul Cores were invisible to the naked eye without the aid of those with powers hailing from an ascension ritual. They evaporated completely from any measurable scientific existence a few hours after death, and removal beforehand ensured that death was pretty quick.
Another sigh of relief from the apparition, with a strange reverberation to it.
Another blink, and it peeled apart, atom by atom, flaking and fizzling into the air around it until there was no evidence it had ever truly existed save for the ravaged carcass of the Beast. Perhaps it had achieved some sort of freedom from such a pained half-existence.
Well, saves us some juice from the fusion generator, I guess?
A smile came to the lips at Alfred’s sentiment, but there was also an edge of coldness. Sorrow. Despair.
Over the decades the Class 7 had mastered the art of human intonation and expressing raw emotion, lacking an individual body beyond a holographic projection.
Even the dead are reserved little justice in places like these.
A pause.
“Too many phantoms.”
The red outline had faded from the dead beast to be more grey, but the Fringe had never even registered in the first place, immaterial and partially ethereal as it was. There was nothing outside a visual to measure or sense, even across their myriad suites of technology. Alfred had tried yet again in those fractions of seconds, of course. To no avail. Both only experiencing a sudden absence of thermal energy in the space, frosting the inside of the crashed transport.
When The Fringe disappeared, the thermal energy of the space filled back in slowly via atmospheric heat and passive radiation as if it was never there afterwards.
Peeking into the Betty’s husk again, a quick sweep marked those that had been travelling aboard the aircraft, some intact, some in pieces.
All dead.
Sergeant Hank Olgar, Spectre, Recon Ops, Home Defense Fleet.
Private Maria Graust, 2nd Battalion, Home Defense Fleet.
Pilot Marjorie Flanders, GRAS The Sun, Home Defense Fleet.
And so on, and so forth, all two dozen or so bodies illuminated in green highlighting, projected in the brain and attached processors through the softly glowing right eye. They flashed one by one, highlighted with neon green as each body was matched with their combat orders, position, and seating location when initially departing from the carrier. Then cross-referenced to One’s own FoF pings on them post-crash.
All logged and catalogued for the recovery teams that would come after to make their jobs easier. Alfred added a small location marker to the FoF noting the Beast and Fringe contact.
They turned, following their previous path – a body here, an exoskeleton there, and even the odd downed air unit interspersed between the remains of armor and personnel, debris downed from anti-aircraft fire.
In the moment, movement had been fluid, with decisions and motions decided in milliseconds by the two in One as they danced forwards to break the enemy advance, blades and guns aflare in arcs of acrobatics and death-dealing artistry. Time always slowed down in the thick of combat for the two, with everybody else around the partner duo moving at what felt like half-speed, save the Seraphs and other machine-assisted enemies that could keep up.
Here, the carved armor of a Seraph, deep grooves in the neck, helmet, and weaker joints, where the armor was thin. Where plasma-coated wrist blades had peeled through like a hot knife through butter, butchering around the ceramic plates that might slow the near-instant torching of the plasma.
There, the discarded, damaged Jackhammer, empty, from more than one extended stand to hold the line whilst ammunition or reinforcements arrived.
They left the large, two handed, plasma-spewing gatling gun where it lay, half buried in the mud and the brown, murky waters at the bottom of the nearby dip of the trenches. No use in salvaging it, for the water bath of the last few days had likely beaten the pressure seals and fried the circuitry. The aging gun design was more of a symbol than anything in The Resistance these days.
They continued on, marking the Betty transport as a hotspot a second time and giving the warning across the battlenet that an odd number of beasts were still lurking amidst the bodies and war machines now sinking slowly into the sandy muck with each cloudburst crossing overhead. They had dealt with beasts already in this fight, the gods dumping a few batches across the trenches here and there throughout the assault. But one could never be sure with such parasitic monsters, so adept as they were at hiding with color-camouflage across the carapace and ambush predation cooked right into the damn genes.
When they finally reached the decimated remains of the G.O.D. rear lines, with blackened anti-aircraft guns and shattered or holed drop-bunkers marking the now-reoccupied beachhead, they turned. Forlorn – looking back across the hilly landscape of soggy trenches and trampled grasses with one left organic eye and one mechanical right one.
A Chayot slumped nearby in a sitting position against the concrete and steel barricades, the armor oddly-enough still intact. A sniper round had found the visor of the pilot’s helmet. The body sat there unmoving beside them as they gazed across the quiet battlefield, until a strong zephyr cut across the plain, wafting the cloth and silk strips laden with religious iconographies strung across the suit. They flapped wetly against the red and white paint of the armor itself until the warm winds died back down and the rain steadied.
Lightning connected and arced across the plasma shielding of The Sun in another brilliant cascade of forked energy, rippling the cerulean orb of the shields into visibility again as jagged white lines snaked across the blue before fading again.
Well, at least we didn’t have to deal with The Armada. Body counts would have been far higher with Berserkers, Harlequins, and Dread Knights on the field.
A solemn nod at that. Dread Knights and Harlequin Knights peeled through drones like paper with crushing metal claws and brutal heavy weaponry.
Alfred did have a way of finding silver linings.
“The cost is still too great.”
It was spoken aloud by choice, yet only intended for one other.
Superweapons, musing on mortality.
Reflecting upon the losses, even as names upon names of the casualty reports cycled through awareness via Alfred.
The long lists of others were identified, positioned, then catalogued as deceased, or rescued for medical treatment, removed from the lists of the MIA in rather small numbers compared to those confirmed KIA.
They watched as Starcaller Serandis, Eclipse Auxiliaries popped up in the feed, changing from MIA to KIA.
Perhaps responsible for The Fringe that had helped them. Perhaps The Fringe herself.
Another few minutes of silence, as cloudbursts passed overhead and showered them in cold rain. The holes in the crowds were mostly gone, The Guardians of Destiny Navy running now with their tail between their legs.
The Chayot’s iconographies matted against the armor with the soft pinging of rain on metal, soggy and wet. The G.O.D. Helix blurred.
Well, we’d best call for a lift. Tarnos, Heph, and Revol will want a sitrep from us personally.
“Yes, please, Alfred.”
A long pause as Alfred located a free pilot over the battlenet. Many were already quite busy with recoveries and pickups.
“I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Then silence.
A long gaze across the trenches, broken only by rain and thunder.
Until an Agatha came to collect them.
