Chapter 179 - Ghosts Of The Old World

Note : Chapters 180, 181 and 182 have been written and added to the queue, wrapping up book 5 !

Chapter 179

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

Outskirts of the City of Rebirth

Alexandra wasn't a specialist of boarding actions. Her skillset related to building and commanding the ships that would cripple the vessel to be boarded. But even though she no longer had her marine combat programs, lost alongside her implants, she still remembered her old training from her ensign anti-piracy tour in Sol's khuiper belt, not to mention her experience 'peacekeeping' on Vesta station and more recently the fight to subdue Seraph.

Her golems swept throughout the ship, staying in a single, coordinated force. She wasn't looking to take over the vessel and clear it, she only needed to access the databanks and fabricator arrays, take what she could, and leave.

Not that the enemy was making it easy. On the plus side, the ship was far less defended than the command bunker of a strategically vital installation like Seraph's little domain, and the tech level was definitely lower. The turrets were more primitive, armed with simple laser rifles and even chemical autocannons instead of Seraph's laser gatlings and ceiling mounted railguns, the checkpoints less numerous, and she hadn't even seen a single combat unit.

However, this was a support ship, lined bulkhead to bulkhead with supplies, spare parts and machinery to make or preserve both.

Which meant that unlike most of Seraph's troops, those ones she was facing actually worked more or less as their builders had intended.

Unluckily for them, the same could be said for her golems.

They carved a fiery path through the ship, making a beeline towards the ship's armored center. Translating spaceship design to some kind of landbound support vessel wasn't an exact science, but anyone with half a brain would put the databanks and the key parts of the ship in an armored central section, using the rest of the vessel as ablative armor, push came to shove.

Alexandra knew she'd hit the jackpot when she came in front of a massively armored hatch, the walls equally reinforced, forming what had to be a full second armor belt. Paranoid, but then again, that was how the UIS had made its dreadnoughts so damned resilient in the first place.

She didn't even have the time to give an order as the hatch slammed open, and disgorged a torrent of combat units, followed closely by what looked like golems in actual power armor, using their larger brethren as mobile cover.

Well well, maybe the ship's builders had loaded the final defensive layer with some tactical programs after all, instead of the 'run towards foe and shoot gun' protocol the rest of the onboard security had been running until now.

Her praetorian guards dove into cover, exchanging fire with the enemy, and Alexandra quickly realized that railguns and lasers alone weren't going to cut it. The combat units were being shredded, their armor failing under the hail of firepower, but the power armor was already advancing on her own troops, pressing them relentlessly, and they were both too numerous and too agile for what was essentially an anti-tank weapon to be effective.

Thankfully, she had come prepared, and her praetorian guards began falling back in good order, the enemy rushing after them.

Right into the arms of the waiting diffraction lances.

Beams of coherent energy stabbed out, and armor after armor fell. Dodging was pointless, the weapon didn't need to move to track them as the beam splitter that gave the gun its name simply changed which way to let the energy out, and the ability to split its considerable firepower made it impossible to simply rush it.

But once again, the enemy surprised Alexandra as the power armored units fell back in good order…and followed up with their own heavy weapons.

Plasma cannons spoke, and the diffraction lance gunners fell silent as bolts of incandescent matter reduced them to atoms.

Alexandra grimaced. She couldn't simply flood the hallway with grenades, not without completely wrecking it and compromising her way in -and out, she doubted her golems could just carry the stuff they'd come for on their shoulders after all!-, so that meant a more…delicate approach.

A second group of praetorian guards rushed forward, wielding something akin to an elephant gun, or a hand cannon. Weapons specially made to fire Ella's 'unwinder rounds'.

The heavy weapon wielding power armor enemies flew apart, ripped into shreds by the gravity vortexes, but not before taking most of the praetorians with them in one last, defiant volley.

Alexandra's golems surged forward, sweeping up what was left of the enemies, and Alexandra let out a sigh of relief.

The hallway had taken a beating, but it was more than useable still.

As the guards rushed in to secure the ship's core -and prevent the doors from shutting again-, the Earth-born diverted one of them to inspect the power armor. It looked…odd.

What she saw chilled her blood.

It looked odd because it hadn't seemed like some kind of golem, it had looked like regular power armor, meant to be worn by humans.

And it was. Within the broken suit, she saw the charred remnant of a mumified corpse.

Those were marines. Genuine, human marines…millenia dead, their suits fighting on despite their fall. And they didn't seem like undead either.

That explained the tactics. The armors were probably programmed to at least have some passable combat protocols, if they had a human inside to override them…and if they could continue fighting despite their death, keeping up with the still alive marines.

Question was, how had all these soldiers died, if the ship they were protecting was still working? She had seen that with Seraph but that had-

That had been at the beginning of the war. During the first strike. And the weapons used to end it were exactly the same. Or at least they sure seemed to have had the same effect!

Alexandra swore softly, as she filed the information for later, ordering a couple of her golems to grab the most intact suit.

If she knew marines even half as well as she thought she did, there'd be some personal data storage somewhere in the armor, that wouldn't be wired to the automatic datawipe upon death every military suit of power armor came with on Earth. Hopefully that would give her some clue of whatever the hell had happened here.

She focused on the golems inside the ship's core…and came to a screeching halt.

The bridge's doors were wide open, revealing a vast room that looked painfully like the bridge of an EFSN warship, complete with the small raised command platform and the concentric rings of bridge computer stations.

And in the middle of it stood a middle aged man with a piercing gaze, looking straight at her golem, a captain's insigna emblazed upon his uniform.

*****

Allya swore and dove to the ground as the landship fired.

Beams of coherent light and less identifiable ordonnance swept the area around her, vaporizing golems and guards alike.

"Damn it! This isn't working!" She yelled out.

"What?!?" Shouted Anders as he came closer to her.

"We need a battle plan!" She looked around, and gritted her teeth. Crystal's damn boss had vanished into the mass, and the golems just appeared to be throwing themselves at the enemy! At least the artillery was still working, for the good it did them, but without Starvak, they were dead meat!

Then she saw Sonya, team Crystalline's sorceress, throw the husk of a tank at a landship, causing it to shudder and lose altitude as the makeshift projectile pierced through the failing shield, and dented the dilapidated armor, damaging the machinery underneath.

"I have an idea!" She yelled out, as she tried to get the sorceress' attention.

Predictably, she was far too distracted for that, and Allya gestured at her escorting spider tank.

Somehow divining her meaning, the tank pivoted…and fired.

The shell missed, but that definitely got the sorceress' attention, as she whirled around in mid air, and rushed towards the baroness.

"What the actual fuck are you doi-" She began to yell before Allya interrupted her.

"Your catapult spell Sonya, can you use it to throw people? Slow enough to go through the shields?"

As she'd expected, the seemingly random question cut right through the sorceress' righteous anger and she blinked as she actually thought about it.

"What? I mean, yes, but why-"

"Great! Start loading whoever you can and throw them!" Said Allya with her best parade ground snap. Even with the bracelets of leap, the damned ships had apparently grown a brain, or at least wisened up a bit, as they were attempting to dodge the mass of foot soldiers trying to board them. Not perfectly, but enough that many adventurers, most of which had never used the spell before, landed on the side hull or missed their jump entirely.

An unlucky few landed in on the cruisers' tracks, instantly reduced to a grisly stain on the massive machinery.

The command tone, her reputation or just because the idea made sense, got through to the sorceress, as she nodded, and began grabbing entire groups of people milling around and trying to take ineffective pot shots at the vessels, and threw them by the dozen in perfectly aimed packets.

Allya began to sigh in relief, as that would at least give her some breathing room, before she felt herself being picked up by Sonya's magic.

"No wait, fuck not meeeeeeeee!" She yelled as she was catapulted into the air, her bodyguards in tow.

*****

"Hello, lackeys of the false gods." Said the man that simply could not be there, as the captain of the vessel walked down the stairs leading to his command platform, and smiled affably. "It is a pleasure to meet face to face with my enemy at long last. In a manner of speaking of course."

The man smiled, and Alexandra realized with a start that the man wasn't casting a shadow.

A hologram. Or some other kind of illusion. But why-

"When command warned me of the ships emerging from hyperspace and destroying what was left of our assets in orbit, I knew the Gods had come back to finish the job. Well, not them of course, it wouldn't do for so called 'divinities' to get their hands dirty, now would it?" He chuckled mirthlessly. "So they sent their puppets. I know you won't listen, and I know I will be dead long before you land your ships to take my command from me. But I will say it anyway. What we did, we did for humanity. Always. You never saw the cage around yourself and our kind, but we did. And we saw the truth of what the Gods did. What happened to those that came before us." He shook his head. "But I suppose this doesn't matter now. They will wipe out what remain of our resistance. Maybe they will rebuild a new society of slaves, or maybe they will do away with the pretenses entirely and leave this world a silent marker to our rebellion, to mankind standing up against its oppressors."

The hologram turned around, and climbed back up to the command chair, the long dead captain talking over his shoulder.

"I suppose it doesn't matter. And I doubt that, as any good puppet, you would care either way. I don't know what happens next. But I can tell you two things. The first one is that as long as there are humans, there will be those to fight for our freedom. Even amongst your own hallowed ranks, there will be those who doubt, who seek the truth. The second one…" He smiled, and pressed a button on his armrest, the system faithfully replicating the action although the fixture did not move a milimeter. But the programs faithfully continued on as if it had, instructions coursing through the ship's internal network. "Is that you and your comrades will not be leaving this ship."

Alexandra already had her praetorian guards sprinting out into the hallway before he'd finished his sentence. She'd known what was going to happen the second he'd reached for his chair.

After all, she'd almost done the same after she murdered an entire world.

Alarms blared, and emergency lighting came online as the PA system crackled to life, after millenia of disuse.

"ALERT! ALERT! SELF DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! ALL PERSONNEL ABANDON SHIP!"

Alexandra wasn't listening, as her golems erupted into the engineering room, and she rushed the already overloading reactor core.

Time to see if she was still the engineer she thought she was.