Frozen Soul, and other works: Chapter 157

(BSN Shinokage, Amazon Gateway, Amazon System)

Cali moaned responsively as she bounced upon my lap while we relaxed on the Shinokage. The cruiser, along with the Shadowdancer and Simo Hayha were patrolling the Amazon system to ensure that foolish people didn’t try to land on the surface. Well, other than the group from the Empire.

Actually, we were watching that group with some interest. A group calling themselves the Friends of Humanity had conducted a test on Earth using Nomads as guinea pigs to try and make a new ‘sanctuary’ just north of London. Their methods involved setting off several EMPs to knock out the nanites in the area, and then rushing down with shuttles to try and set up the ‘fence’ before the nanites could fill in the sudden gap. On paper, it should have worked. Unfortunately, the whole thing ended in failure and the shuttles just barely managed to get out of the atmosphere before the nanites could get through their shields.

As for why it didn’t work? Well, I’d made the command decision to leave out a lot of the pertinent information about Greenwave and the fences when Black Star announced anything. Kept it off the forums or chat rooms, too. See, the first thing one thinks of when you talk about trying to defeat some technological menace is an EMP. It is so basic that everyone at least considers it, even if a lot of systems have moved past the point where an EMP will actually affect the circuitry. As an anti-tech superweapon, however, Greenwave was specifically hardened to shrug off an EMP.

So, someone in the Friends of Humanity group got the great idea that if knocking the nanites out didn’t work, maybe they could try blowing them up. The new plan involved actual nuclear weapons. More than a few of them, actually. There was literally no chance in hell that the Empire would allow these idiots to set off a bunch of nukes over North America, where they wanted to build their compound, so they’d come out to currently unclaimed space, to see if they couldn’t create a ‘sanctuary’ on the Amazon planet.

The Friends of Humanity ships (basically commercial freighters given a new coat of paint) flew in what could only be called a ‘formation’ if one took chaos theory and applied it to three-dimensional movement and then had a group of data points somewhere in the field. These were clearly civilian pilots at the helm of the freighters. Probably just people who had a few hours of flight experience before they came on this trip. If this was the level of technical expertise involved with the rest of their operation, I could see why the Nomads had decided not to come along on this leg of the venture.

Well, that, and the fact that apparently these humans were basically the Klan, but in space. They didn’t care too much about race, honestly, though they did have something against people who got cybernetics or other augmentations for anything other than ‘my arm got blown off’ or similar situations. Said it made them ‘impure’ and ‘less human’. They REALLY didn’t like people who ‘dirtied the blood’ by having relations with other species. They’d kept it quiet from the Nomads at first, but nutjobs like them can’t really shut up about their thoughts for too long.

So, this group was all just ‘locals’, who were trying to set up a haven on a new world, where there was no government, by nuking the hell out of the site they wanted to settle. Oh, sure, that pretty much guaranteed that the place would be a radioactive wasteland initially, but these people weren’t entirely stupid. The technology to clean up radioactive hellholes existed, and terraforming was an old process that people knew well. If the nukes actually worked to clear the Greenwave nanites from the area long enough for them to set up the shield fences, then they would have a nice little terrorist base to build up for their little campaign to make things pure again.

OK, maybe it wasn’t ENTIRELY coincidental that my ships were here watching the tests. Or the fact that we remained cloaked, so that they didn’t know were sitting there, watching. I didn’t care for these people, or their ideology, and having a haven for racist nutjobs so close to Nuevo Edo wasn’t something I was keen on. My main hope was that the nukes would fail to do the job, in which case I wouldn’t have to do anything. If they succeeded, though? Then I’d have to get creative in order to keep this from being a problem later on.

Cali’s moan brought me out of my momentary reflections. I’d been leaning back in my chair and letting her do all the work anyway, but now I grabbed her by her hips and slammed her down upon my cock, causing the pour girl to shudder in pleasure. “Mmm. Very good, my pet. I see you’ve been practicing those moves Shearah found in Dimiya’s cultural database. Their version of the Kama Sutra was quite… illuminating, don’t you agree?”

The lithe little warrior moaned happily in response. “Oh, yes, Master! We all had so much fun reviewing the ‘research materials’. Do you want to see what my next move is?”

“Master, this is Captain Inatumal on the bridge. You wished to be informed when the Friends of Humanity began their tests. They will be ready to fire their nukes in ten minutes.”

“Thank you, Captain. Begin recording, all sensors. I wish to see how they do. Maintain full stealth. I want them to think that they’re being sneaky. I’ll be there shortly.”

“Understood, Master.”

As I looked away from the communicator, I smiled at the pout Cali was giving me. “Don’t be like that, Cali. There will be plenty of time for you to show me your moves. But now, you better hurry up if you want to finish the job before I need to be on the bridge.”

Ten minutes later, I was on the main bridge of the Shinokage, standing next to Captain Inatumal, her sister by my side. Shinokage’s tactical team leader looked over to me, and whispered, “Should I have the teams ready to go, Master? We could take their four freighters easily enough.”

I shook my head. “No, I have no interest in prisoners at this time. For now, we’re just observing to see if these people have discovered a way to carve out a ‘safe zone’ in a Greenwave area after the nanites have already spread. I doubt it will be so easy, but we’ll see.”

From the communications console, the crewman who was monitoring the Friends of Humanity ship communications called out, “Captain, the freighter Alamos 20K just reported to the other freighters that they fixed the launch rig that had been improperly installed. Launch commencing in thirty seconds.”

The Captain nodded to the comm officer, and then turned to look at her sensor operator, “Sensors?”

The sensor officer looked up from her screens. “All sensors locked and recording. We’re getting a solid record of everything they’re doing. However, we won’t know whether their plan works until they send the shuttles down with the fence materials.” She paused, and then said, “Freighter Alamos 20K has launched missiles. Counting seven good launches. Reading shields on the missiles, increasing their sensor profile. Detonation in three, two, one, now. We have multiple nuclear detonations.”

Captain Inatumal nodded. “Visual scanners, on the main screen. Let us see what the blast zone looks like.”

The scene that greeted them was just what one would expect in the aftermath of multiple nuclear strikes in the middle of what had probably been a city before Greenwave ate everything, given that there was a distinct lack of large trees in the ‘before’ picture, and any grass was patchy, at best. Now, though, we saw seven mushroom clouds rising over area, in a perfect hexagon with one blast in the middle of the effect. Frankly, I was just impressed that they managed to get seven nukes that actually worked. Figuring out who sold them the material was a job for someone else, but it did make me uncomfortable, having what amounted to racist gangs being able to get weapons of mass destruction was not a good sign about the state of the galaxy at the moment.

“Shuttles entering the atmosphere, Captain. Sensors locked on them. So far, we don’t see any sign of nanite interaction.”

I nodded from where I was watching. “Yes, that much is to be expected. A few nukes in the area are going to knock around and disorient the nanites a bit, to say the least. But the question is whether they’ve been destroyed, or merely knocked around? Every surface in that area was infested with nanites. To make the area ‘safe’, they would have to not merely suppress the nanites, but eradicate them, or you risk any little thing causing them to reawaken and spread throughout your ‘sanctuary’. It is like a cancer patient in remission before the cures were discovered. You could treat it, kill off a lot of it, but even when you cut it out, there was always a chance that it would return. For someplace like the Amazon planet, it would likely not be ‘safe’ for fifty years or more. And I wouldn’t put anything I wanted to keep intact long-term on that planet for at least a hundred years.”

“Shuttles have landed in their designated positions. Looks like they’re setting up the fences now.”

Thirty minutes after the detonation of the nukes, the eight ‘fenceposts’ were placed and ready. Then, the moment of truth, when the fence was turned on, and no one’s suit had been eaten by nanites. So far, the whole situation had been going according to plan. At least, until the first of the freighters, Hand of Five, tried to land in the safe zone, and accidentally broke through a place where underground works had been critically weakened by the nanites eating all the support structures. But those works had also been shielded from the blast waves of the nukes.

The screams of the crew as their ship began to get eaten around them, and then their suits were eaten, exposing them to the lethal amounts of radiation in the area, were horrible to hear. So I ordered the comms officer to mute the audio. “As I said, remission and reinfection. Captain, signal the group. Jam all transmissions from the freighters. Destroy the Alamos 20K, with prejudice. I don’t trust these idiots not to have more nukes to try and ‘cleanse’ the infection. Shadowdancer and Simo Hayha are tasked to disable the Humanis Policlub and Human Nation, and use tractor beams to push them into the atmosphere so they may join their friends on the surface.”

Three warships against three freighters was no contest, and the whole ‘battle’ was really not worth describing more than likening it to swatting flies. One ‘barrel’ of Shinokage’s main weapon was enough to utterly destroy the Alamos 20K, and the two other freighters were soon disabled, and deorbiting nicely as the nanites began to consume their unprotected hulls. “Send a message to news services. Advise them that, while on a routine patrol for pirates, we encountered several freighters that ignored the quarantine warnings around the Amazon planet, and attempted to force a landing in an attempt to set up a new ‘sanctuary’. The result was a failure, with all hands lost. Attach audio of the communications from the Hand of Five, but cut it before it gets to any of the gruesome parts. Make sure to tell them that all hands in the expedition were lost.”

“At once, Admiral.”

The sensor officer looked up, “Captain, the Gateway just activated. Probes register incoming gateway from Alpha Centauri. Three ships exiting… Identifications reading as the corvettes INS Adder and INS Copperhead, but the third ship only has a generic system ID, registering it as a… Nova Eden-class colony ship. It looks brand new, but those things haven’t been made in at least fifty years, not since the second round of expansion after the Gateways were discovered ended!”

I perked up at that. “Ah, good. Captain, if you would please hail the Imperial craft, I believe our waiting here has come to an end. The Empress has just delivered our payment for helping to free Terra from the clutches of the AI.”