Sean-Michael Argo - Ghost Faction

There were plenty of stories on the lit feeds and the vid sites that depicted great heroes on battlefields of ancient history and imaginative fantasy. They usually involved somewhat simple plots, wherein a hero would rise from the ashes of some tragedy to embark upon a quest of one kind or another. Generally, there were strong notions of good and evil, right and wrong, who was the hero and who was the villain.

She had enjoyed such stories in her youth, especially the lit feeds, as the heroes in such tales were nearly always from the elite classes. They were lords and ladies, great warriors and fair maidens, always placed in situations where there was a clear choice to be made and a comfortable definition of victory.

Yes, thought Jada, listening to Marcus detail the progress of other raids on planets within this enigmatic system, disrupting Helion’s as yet unknown set of goals, those stories were comfortable. So too, were the histories she’d learned in school, where this nation attempted to conquer that nation, or this tribe battled that tribe over territory or feud. Always, the choices were clear and the victory complete, but these were the most ancient of histories, and as history progressed towards her own time, the nature of warfare changed and what it meant to be a hero changed with it.

There was little narrative in modern warfare. Her experience of war was compartmentalized, and Jada knew now, after many years of violence, that it was the same for all corporate soldiers. Individual battles were disconnected from one another in the mind of the soldier, as they were not privy to the greater unfolding of events. There were no righteous causes in the corporate world, only a struggle for recourses, territory, and profits. There was no cause save the bottom line, and this was not an age of heroes.

Briefing.

Mission.

De-Briefing.

Rest and Refit.

Repeat.

That was her experience of war, so it caught Jada by surprise when Marcus addressed the core goal of their pending mission.

“This mission is what the Ellisian War has been all about,” stated Marcus as he commanded the rapt attention of everyone in the briefing room. “We have reached the apex of every corporate endeavor since first crossing the Line.”

Marcus turned from his lectern and gestured to the long-range scan readouts being projected onto the high wall behind him. A cascading series of images played across the screen, each of them showing various depictions of massive excavation activity.

The sight of them turned Jada’s stomach, as if there was something intrinsically alien about the angles of those stones, the way rock and earth flowed together mixed with the hard edges of Helion excavations. It was as if the alien planet obeyed different laws of physics, fighting against the introduction of humanity and its love of right angles. She had been on several planets this side of the Ellisian Line since the trade war and had experienced the strange formations that had been revealed to be cities. However, it wasn’t until she saw the raw images of humanity’s efforts to dig up this ancient and alien realm that she truly understood how different their civilizations had to be. One was ancient, elegant, and long since departed, the other contemporary, brutish in its greed, yet very much present.

“Our employers have determined that theories of previous alien civilization are correct. As many of you have rightly observed, the ‘ghost’ effect on short-range sonar fits with predictable models of pedestrian and mounted traffic and habitation if one supposes that the flowstone areas are in fact ancient urban zones,” stated Marcus as he displayed a number of scanner readouts showing the ghost effect. Jada even recognized some of the readouts from her own ATV deck in the presentation.

“While we are still determining the technology which allowed for such harmonized structure planning and execution, especially considering the environmental ruin that has been made of these planets, the official determination is that these are all cities of varying size and chief industry. We cannot presume, at this point, what the exact relationship was between the afore-mentioned inhabitants and the Gedra machines, though we are certain a connection exists. The key to that connection, and perhaps Ellisian space at large, appears to lie within the carcass of this planet.”

Marcus toggled over to a view of scanner photos that depicted semi-circles of various sizes jutting up from the flowstone in dozens of excavation sites, each one larger than the next. The final photo Marcus left on display, zooming in several degrees to give the attendees of the briefing a more complete view of the ring.

Around it was a dig crater easily the size of a starship. Jada realized that she was looking at an excavation site that dwarfed any other she’d seen. In the harsh light of the dying sun, she could see that the ring was made from some manner of polished flowstone and that, more than anything, led credence in her mind to the theory that this ancient civilization had some way to shape the very landscape. Humans were adept at tearing up the land, processing it, and building something else with it, but to shape the land without changing what it was to begin with, that was something that almost seemed too advanced to be witnessed outside the lit feeds and vid sites.

“Augur specialists have analyzed these images and theorize that what you see before you is, in fact, a weapon, or to put a finer point on it, the ultimate weapon. It is believed that an, as yet, unknown energy source powered the rings, and that the weapon built up a charge as energy passed from one ring to the next, until finally reaching this master ring for discharge,” reported Marcus, who then turned from the photo to look out at the audience. “This could very well be the weapon that wiped out all civilization in this part of the universe. The discharge of the weapon may have been what initially created the temporary, even if long-lived, Ellisian Line itself.”

Marcus stopped speaking for a time, allowing the knowledge to sink in as the Dire Swords scrutinized the photo before them.

Jada was beside herself, as never before had she felt like she was part of a series of unfolding events, rather than just a simple hired gun and outside observer. She had been part of the initial military expedition into the tomb-world, and suddenly her mind was overwhelmed with the memories of hurling herself at the cyborg that had killed Patrick Baen and so many others.

Her fingers flexed around the hallucinatory handle of her boarding knife as her muscles recalled the sensation of burying the blade deep in the metallic flesh of the machine. She had been one of the first human beings to fight the machines and live; then again on Gedra Prime, she had found herself face to face with another cyborg. Jada found her center amidst the pain in her muscles, and used her breathing techniques to bring herself back to reality, only to be met with a close up shot of yet another cyborg on the far wall behind Marcus.

“As you can see, when I zoom the image to its maximum capacity, there is a great deal of digital artifacting, such are the limitations of our technology when faced with the incredible amounts of environmental interference; however, you will see that there is a humanoid being at the center of the lower arc of the master ring,” observed Marcus as he pointed to the extremely pixilated image of what could be one of the titanic cyborgs that commanded the tomb-worlds, or at least something similar, only this one seemed to be less of a machine and something more of flesh. “What you do not see, in fact, is the reason for the choice to move so rapidly into mission execution.”

At last, thought Jada to herself as she looked at the photo being zoomed back out by Marcus to reveal the full crater, they were going to be told why exactly they were flying straight through a void fight.