Every myth, every great tale, has its super soldier. The Ancients called them Spartans, Aryans, Berserkers, Fremen. It is the myth of the implacable foe; unyielding; loyal to a fault; bred to be victorious; to believe in the victory. Such tales precede the armies of civilization and prepare the minds of the conquered for their arrival. So, I say to you: be thus prepared. I've met them, the finest warriors in the galaxy, and they call themselves Auraxians.
From Lectures on The Auraxian Crisis, Professor Argyle Crawley, 34565 Galactic Core Standard
***
"We’ve spent ten thousand years with the Conglomerate knife at our throats. I can see that knife; understand it. But I can’t see this one, and that’s what has me on edge.”
“Is this a credible threat? You’ve brought us no evidence. We don’t act on speculation.”
“I don’t ask you to act on mere speculation. Trust your instincts!”
“You mean
your instincts, those same instincts that tell you the Vanu have weaponized the rebirthing technology. The same instincts that that tell you they are preparing to wipe us all out along with the New Conglomerate?
At the same time? Do you know how preposterous that sounds?”
“Damn you! You were my finest student.
Think about the game."
“Yes, focus on the pieces standing still and there’s your play. You taught me that. But what does chess have anything to do with the war? The Sovereignty is in full mobilization and they have been for centuries. There are no pieces
not moving.”
“And there you have it! That’s the problem! Has the New Conglomerate mobilized its reserves? Have we? No, we haven’t. They haven’t. Why would the Vanu fully mobilize against a stalemate? Why would they move every piece on the board? Either they are strategically challenged, or? Come on. Think!”
“Or…they don’t really have every piece on the board.”
“Still my finest student.”
***
“Addressing all points of order. There is a motion on the floor to recognize an emergency hearing from the IntelCom subcommittee on Vanu Affairs. Yays? Nays? The motion carries. The Directorship recognizes the IntelCom Undersecretary.”
“I shall get right to the point. Last week our forces engaged a Vanu amp station defended by the Conclave. While it’s not the first time we’ve confronted the Vanu high command so directly, this engagement stands out as one of the fewer times we’ve had electronic surveillance directed at a Conclave hub for any substantive length of time—“
“I don’t comprehend the emergency, Undersecretary. We know precisely what signals go in and out of a Conclave hub. The same kinds of signals that go in and out of our own. Rebirth signals. They’re damn common.”
“Indeed, some more common than others.”
“An insult?”
“The truth. Yes, we have in the past intercepted thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of rebirth signals. Certainly no great feat; if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, right? Wrong. Each signal is in fact a quantum state describing the deceased for the rebirth matrix. Ergo, each rebirth signal is in fact utterly unique. Never to be repeated. May I therefore draw your attention to this signal log. Knowing that each of these transmissions are unique, each one corresponding with the death of a Vanu soldier, how could it be that we intercepted this individual signal—the exact same signal—fifty eight times?”
“
Order! The Directorship
will have order!”
***
Jamylin awoke to the familiar crackle of a spawn tube powering down. Bleary eyed, weak, and with the mother of all headaches she stumbled onto the deck. She was in a fairly large cell. Twenty some odd meters long by the looks of it, and maybe fifteen wide. The only thing she was sure about was that it wasn’t a standard spawn room. In fact, all it
was was a room. No doors. No equipment terminal of any kind. One glowing bar of light in the ceiling. The walls and floor were flat and mirror smooth, the surface being a self-polishing metamaterial. Nanites. And it was cold. Unbearably cold.
It was as if she was—shit. Naked.
As her eyes adjusted she was able to confirm this fact, her naked reflection staring back at her into infinity from four walls. The reflective efficiency of the metamaterial had to have approached ninety nine percent, because she could see herself for what seemed like kilometers before the false image finally went to black. From the floor her reflection was perfect. She left no discernable foot prints, and she could see every part of herself from just about every angle. This left the ceiling an equally perfect matte finish: light diffused from it at precisely forty-five degrees. It looked like perfect Esamiri snow. It was the same kind of reflective or matte material found on the trim of some Magriders, now in the prototyping phase to replace existing spawn shields. Vanu physicists were all show offs. She knew them all by name.
“It’s not really that cold, you know.” Julia’s voice seemed to come from everywhere.
“Is this it? After all of that? Is this really it? A cold room?”
“Do you know what day it is?”
“Does time even matter in this place?”
“Always so difficult,” Julia muttered to herself. “All you had to do was keep studying the time dilation and provide us with an accurate enough coefficient. But no, you had to go rogue and listen for that… planet.”
“Earth? And wait, coefficient?” Jamylin was perplexed. She had discovered a temporal displacement encompassing the entirety of Auraxis, and used it to adjust the frequencies of incoming radio emissions. She’d discovered that Auraxis orbited just outside the radiation belt of the Jovian world holding it in its thrall, ensuring the moon was bathed in just enough energy to make life feasible. The initial expedition didn’t bother investigating it when they discovered Auraxis harbored life in the first place. So, owing to the fact the Vanu Sovereignty declared her discoveries heresy she became, in effect, Auraxis’ sole radio-astronomer.
Jamylin continued aloud.
“They wanted to make planetfall as swiftly as possible, and by then it was too late. The temporal displacement completely obscured those radio waves, stretching them so flat they were squelched by the cosmic microwave background. In effect, it was invisible. And then the war started. No one really cared. And so, no one noticed when were probed by a powerful beam of radar, and no one noticed when it became awash in modulated frequencies. Julia, Earth knows we’re here! We can go home!”
From where ever she was speaking Julia was silent. And it seemed to be getting colder. By now her fingers and toes were beginning to hurt. Soon they’d go numb. Finally, after an hour—or five minutes—Julia spoke again.
“It’s not that cold in here, you know?”
“What are you talking about? It’s freezing… damnit Julia pull your head out of your ass!”
“Freezing? You think it’s freezing? Ms. Alrik, it’s barely below thirteen degrees. It may help if I explain what is happening to you, since your area of expertise isn’t human physiology. It doesn’t require a great drop in temperature to cause your body to take heat saving measures. One of them being thermal induced vasoconstriction. Under normal circumstances you’d begin to go numb, and only become aware of it when warming back up, but I’m sure you’re feeling it by now. Intense vasoconstriction is quite painful, and for you there is no relief. We’ve taken steps to ensure every part of you stays just warm enough to feel it.
“That is—at least—what I’m ordered to tell you. Duty requires degrees of indifference toward subordinates like yourself, but for that I’ve failed. I loathe you, Doctor Jamylin Alrik. Did you know I sequenced your genome while you were in stasis? And do you know what I found? You’re defective. But I didn’t need to sift through your DNA to figure that out. Aside the fact you have two sets of chromosomes that are suspiciously alike—your behavior says it all. Vanu will decide when and how this war ends, not a backwater inbred defect like you!!”
Just then there was a blur, and before Jamylin’s brain could finish processing
Stalker and route that information to the rest of her body, it was interrupted by a brutal uppercut to her still chattering jaw. She didn’t notice the blow leaving Julia decloaked because she was too busy handling reflexes from her throat. Yes, those were pieces of her teeth she had accidentally swallowed, and no sooner had she figured this out her legs were swept from beneath her. Hauling herself up to her feet Julia was nowhere to be seen. The only evidence of her having been there were Jamylin’s blood soaked breasts, and the dripping puddle of it beneath her.
Defect or not, a Vanu scientist is still an Auraxian, a product of ten thousand years of non-stop war. So, when Julia let her next blow fly she was ready for it. This time it was a level right hook, which meant Julia’s cloak disengaged just in time for her to roll with it. The glancing blow left Julia over extended, and provided Jamylin with an opening long enough to seize the slippery Stalker in a grapple, and bury her knee into her liver.
“
Auraxians do not practice any florid or precise martial arts. They share more in common with functional military self-defense strategies such as ancient special forces combatives and Old Krav Maga—just finely tuned—for ten millennia. It reflects the rapid transition from empty weapons to knives, and then to fists as close quarters combat quickly devolves into a body breaking melee. It is wholly uncommon for us to enter such combat scenarios willfully. Dispatching the enemy at range with a rifle—or from orbit—is far more preferable to the overt brutality of hand-to-hand combat. But, Auraxians don’t think like we do, and in certain rare situations outside their well-honed tactical efficiencies seem to intentionally seek the most brutal forms of war. Nowhere is this seeming preference for brutality more evident than a confrontation between just two Auraxian females.”
There is no way to properly describe the way Julia leaned into the blow, pushing Jamylin off her feet, or how she slammed her shoulder into Jamylin’s neck, or the repeated retaliatory blows to the face and neck she sustained as Jamylin fought from her back. Between them no rules of war or honor were recognized. Jamylin wasn’t above taking hold of a fistful of Julia’s hair and wrenching her away, and Julia wasn’t so sensitive to give in to the pain of it being torn from her scalp, or busting her knuckles open as she missed the scientist’s face and plowed her fist into the meta-reflective floor. Nor did pain keep Jamylin from biting at Julia’s neck with shattered teeth barely clinging to the gums. They didn’t roll very far, or maneuver much, or take much heed to self-inflicted damage. No effort at defense was made. No protecting the face, no dodging; each move was to strike the other.
Contrary to the precision and speed of Auraxian warfare, on display between them was complete disregard for combat efficiency. It was a personal hatred driving them to murderous thresholds of rage, and the only hope of stopping it was the introduction of another belligerent. Which is to say, on Auraxis, a personal fight between two people is almost always interrupted by something else. A shell, a sniper, another soldier behind, a soldier below, a grenade, death and respawn. But not here. Not in this place. The death of one is punctuated by the primal shriek of the other, answered by the respawning foe flying from the spawn tube in an uninterrupted orgy of wasted pain.
While the air filled with the pungent aerosol of blood, the floor rejected it completely. It pooled in defined beads where ever it landed, splashed on the walls and snaked down without leaving a trace. They murdered one another faster than the nanites in their blood streams could dissolve their corpses that littered the room, hopelessly disfigured and mutilated beyond anything but the most abstract means of identification. It may be tempting to describe them as somehow less than human, perhaps, likening them to animals, but even animals recognize when the fight should end. Make no mistake, there is no level of destruction beyond human reckoning so long as death itself is no longer an option.
And it was that realization that finally broke Jamylin Alrik.
“Stop!” At least, she tried to say stop. It came out more like, “Dhob!”
In this insensate defile of Roman scale, anything halfway resembling coherent speech is a surprise. It wasn’t lost on Julia. She paused across from Jamylin, backing off and stumbling over a previously living version of herself.
“What?”
“Stop... please… I’ll take it.”
It had never occurred to Julia that lurking inside the warrior turned scientist turned gladiator was a pacifist. In fact she was rather alarmed by it, and stepped forward to take Jamylin by the arm just to make sure, landing a pair of completely unmitigated punches squarely to her nose. The resulting brain hemorrhage filled Jamylin’s eyes with a red haze before she collapsed. Ten seconds later she stepped out of the spawn tube and fell to her knees.
As the prototype nanite shield around the pair dissolved from the floor up, she watched through tear soaked eyes that lent such an ethereal quality to it that—for a moment—left her breathless. To the Vanu, technology is not merely might, it is a divine, beautiful, living thing to be loved and worshiped in the most literal sense of the words. Mentally broken at last, it was on that divinity Jamylin relied upon to process the following events. So, when I tell you she accepted from the arriving guards that vial of neural disruptor serum like a lifelong parishioner might receive the Eucharist and cradled it in her arms, lifting it high like a Holy Relic, and that her face had taken on such bliss and contentment one might find in the comfort of a mother’s embrace, you might have an inkling as to why then she smiled beatifically as she loaded it into a pneumatic hypo, put the tip to her neck, and eased her thumb upon the actuator.
To onlookers she took Julia in a grateful embrace, giggled, fell to the floor mumbling like the Oracle at Delphi, and died. Permanently. And yet, as far as Jamylin could tell, the darkness and numbness of death was—disappointingly—incomplete.