The asteroid belt took two jumps and each took three hours to prime the engines. His supercarrier burst out in the vicinity of the Gamalan asteroid belt. He used slip drive to get himself the rest of the way. He armed the supercarrier to its maximum machine awareness, unlike the V2 Darnek, his ship didn’t have an ascendant. He never needed any. His supercarrier unleashed eight autonomous destroyers from its hanger bays and three hundred interceptors poured out from the bottom, idling in a sentry formation.
Thirty interceptors escorted his personal ship as he ventured into the asteroid belt with reaction drives. They weaved through their own paths behind him, sticking to their designated roles in perfect unison.
He reached his destination after an hour of careful traversal through millions of asteroids. The Gamalan asteroid belt was one of the largest and least documented. It was at the edge of a supersized star system unfit for habitation.
He found his brother’s ship anchored to a large asteroid that rivaled his supercarrier in size. He landed while his interceptors arranged themselves in a sentry formation, facing thirty directions, firing their threat detection scanners every second.
He was summoned here by his brother Sixth's distress beacon. He had requested reinforcements. He looked at the derelict ship which remained anchored to the asteroid with tethers. There was no acknowledgment of his arrival. His brother should have pinged him when he was thousands of kilometers away, this was a bad omen.
“Brother Sixth, Can you hear me?” He asked hopping over the asteroid surface to the hatch of the ship that remained sealed. He tried hacking into the ship to open it but the ship had been out of power for a long time. He used a Klin beam to cut the hatch segment off the ship when he ran out of other options. This ship didn’t seem like it could fly anyway.
He launched off the ground into the ship and was immediately drenched from head to toe with black tar. Thick viscous liquid erupted from the segment that he opened. This ship was drowned in deactivated biomass. He had seen this before and he knew what to expect. If it was in such bad shape, this could only mean his brother Sixth suffered a worse fate.
> Scanning…
- no red sect ID detected
There was no trace of him. He fired his scanner again for a more comprehensive result.
> Deep Scanning
> Complete (7s)
> Break scan result
- no red sect ID detected
- contagion detected
- heat signature detected (13% confidence)
The heat came from a small spherical shape idling near the ship’s reactors. The Vervid had lost dominion over biomass. It was trying to use the ship’s fuel rods to recover energy. He aimed a palm in the general direction.
> V2-1: calibrating palm emitters
> complete (0.2s)
> target acquired
- single fire
> estimated energy cost: 3%
The klin beam erupted from his palm with a violent flash of orange and white. It tore through the ship in an instant, vaporizing all material in its path. It cut through the ship and carved a deep hole into the asteroid below. When the sphere was lost, the unclaimed biomass around the reactors collapsed back into floating blobs of tar.
After dealing with the parasite, he quickly disassembled the soul bank and data storage units of the ship. They were also drenched with tar down to their intricate components. The First had a unique module in its base frame that made information extraction much faster than the default configuration. He was the strategist and this was an augment that he picked for himself. Copying all unquantized data worth another Red Sect Sovereign took him less than five minutes. He stored all of it in his ship and automated backup transmission to his supercarrier.
After dealing with the Sixth’s ship, he had to locate the priest’s base frame. His most recent backup souls were accounted for and safely recovered but his current soul held the answer to what happened to him. He had a quick way of scanning the asteroid's surface. He ordered all thirty interceptors to flip back towards the asteroid temporarily and scan everything from thirty different angles.
The result was instantaneous.
> V2-1: Transmission Received
- V2-1-Interceptor: Red Sect ID detected
- 532m away
- preliminary visual confirmation
He hopped across the asteroid's surface towards the waypoint and came upon a crater the size of his personal ship. He located the Sixth lying on the ground across the rim of the crater. He was embedded into the soil, his shape carved into the icy surface. Black tar had drained and collected loosely at the center of the crater, he saw several spherical shapes dipping in and out from this small pond of tar.
The Sixth was dead, his field generators had been crushed by the impact that made this crater. Everything below his chest was flattened synthetic flesh, coolant, and alloy debris. The First already knew what could cause such damage to a priest with Klin shield. He lifted his brother’s head off the ground and rummaged inside his neck cavity to find the soul storage module. His fingers interfaced with the internal components and the dead priest’s eyes flickered orange as he was soul transferred into The First’s soul bank. A dead soul could not be resurrected but its data could be salvaged for the next iteration of the Sixth.
He salvaged all useful components off the crater and hauled them into his ship. He wasn’t sure if the Materium masters could reconstruct or recycle any of it to speed up the manufacturing of the Sixth’s new base frame.
> V2-1: Transmission Received
- V2-1-Interceptor: movement detected
- 18km away
- movement signature unidentified
He quickly turned towards the interceptor that detected it. He could see asteroids bouncing off in the distance as something invisible crashed through them towards him.
The serpent. It was here. It had hammered the sixth to a pulp. He didn’t expect it to hang around where it fought another priest. This wasn’t the usual behavior that he had observed ever since he first encountered it.
The First tossed the corpse of his brother into the hatch and quickly took off from the asteroid. He couldn’t win against this thing fighting by himself, even if he had a fully autonomous fleet. The serpent was as dark and cold as the emptiness of space. His interceptors lost their target lock every few seconds.
He had to escape and he had to escape fast.
Liera took the voider gun and the G-Catalyst cartridge off her battle-frame after she reached The Vellek. She couldn’t navigate inside her small ship with such heavy augments.
“Lira’s back! Hey, what’s this?!” Calan came running to her as soon as she shed the excess weight in the middle of the cargo bay.
“It’s the biggest gun ever, be careful,” she told him half seriously. She couldn’t tell if the manufacturing parameters applied proper safety measures, especially against children. For all she knew. Calan could poke his head into the empty arm socket and find a way to blow everyone to nothingness.
She unloaded the gun’s chambered G-Catalyst and returned it to the cartridge. Calan was less interested in it because it didn’t look as cool as the gun. She watched as he pretended to ‘wear’ the gun like she did. He made shooting sounds with his mouth.
“Did you have fun while I was gone?” she asked just to keep him engaged. This wasn't a necessary question at all but she figured it was a good thing to show interest in what he did. Alienating the child into loneliness would be worse than neurobit damage. She had to be mindful now that she was responsible for him.
“Look I did this with stones!” He ran to show her. He had scratched a coarse wall with the stones that he picked from the outside to play with. The wall was full of various diagrams, stick figures, and spaceships. His planet was at the center, it was a circle with a diagonal line scratched across it.
“Very good, very good,” She praised him. She made sure not to mention anything about lasers. It seemed like he had forgotten about them while he drew with the stones.
“My priestess, Varul the second requests your audience, he wants to talk about something important. I think this has something to do with the First of Second. His supercarrier is heavily damaged!”
Varul had requested a ship from Cinetra when the First’s supercarrier arrived. She had never seen him panic that much over anything. He nearly exploded when Cinetra told him his new ship takes half an hour to prime its reactors as it was coming out of cold storage. He aborted that order and soul-transferred himself to the V2 Darnek in three minutes.
This was extremely fast for a soul transfer, fast enough to be used casually like any other utility function. She wasn’t too surprised. Varul could afford to have the greatest and latest of every technology imaginable. She didn’t know things could be this fast in the current epoch. He had surely found some upgrades towards the end of the dark age.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
His body was still where he stopped walking.
“How is he requesting this meeting?” She was puzzled. Varul was in the V2 Darnek. Requesting an audience was different from initiating a call. “Does he want me to join him on the Darnek?”
“Anything else I should sort out here before I leave?”
“Commander Brenvalo was delirious and he left a message for you. He was adamant that you needed to hear it.”
Liera could see the commander sleeping on the new bed they received from the Fifth. Sineul had given him enough painkillers to pass out.
“What was the message?”
“It is coming,” Sineul told her nonchalantly. “With slight variations of course, He repeated that phrase 176 times before the painkillers knocked him out.”
“Oh yeah!” Calan agreed out of nowhere, he probably heard that phrase. “Old man didn’t say who it is though. Someone’s coming here for sure!”
“Did he talk to you about it?” Liera was concerned. She wasn’t sure if Calan knew how to handle such information.
“Yeah! He drew that to show me,” Calan pointed back at the drawing on the wall.
“This is true, He joined the child for a moment despite his injuries. He was delirious,” Sineul confirmed. This was indeed a weird thing for the Commander to do. She couldn’t figure out why he would talk to the six-year-old about the fear that broke his mind.
“See, look, he did this line!” Calan was already at the wall, pointing at a thick wavy line at the bottom.” He pointed at the thick end of the line. “That’s the head, he said it’s a snake. So I added eyes. Because snakes have eyes. My friend Nimi’s got a little pet snake. It glows blue and red in the dark”
This was quite the backstory but she could see the googly eyes Calan added to the thick end of the line. He had unironically turned commander Brenvalo’s greatest horror into something childishly funny. She was sure this only pushed the poor commander over the edge into hopeless delirium.
“Right, It's good, It’s a great drawing, Calan,” she praised him again. She noticed the size of the line relative to the planet that Calan drew. He could’ve always drawn it smaller. It couldn’t have been easy for a man with broken ribs to put all that effort into drawing it. There was something here, something that she needed to ask Varul directly. The Third put this image in the poor commander’s head. Varul would surely know about it.
“If he wakes up while I’m gone, tell him I understood his message.” she told Sineul.
“Do you?” Sineul was completely puzzled by all of this.
“Of course not, but tell him that anyway.”
His brother had lost an arm and a quarter of his torso during his escape from that cursed serpent. The First of Second lay on the vat of a Materium Fabricator after he was recovered from his broken supercarrier. He wasn’t dead like the Sixth that he recovered, but losing a chunk this large didn’t bode well for him. He had lost both his base-frame arm and the battle-frame arm.
“This arm lacks any Klin emitters, but it can be modified for Voider mode,” the Fifth showed him the design of the new prosthetic.
“Looks good enough,” the arm was a more complex design than most Voider Mode augments. It could shoot projectiles from all five of its fingers. With this augment as his brother’s right arm, the battle-frame’s missing chunk could be repurposed into something else. The current suggestion by the fifth was a cartridge that could house four times the usual amount of G-Catalysts while passively acting as a physical impact shield.
“The material cost is justifiable?”
“Yes, we’re killing that snake.” Varul frowned at him. “It has to be settled within the day,”
“Quite ambitious!” the Fifth remarked, he looked amused.
“Now, If you can excuse me, I have to meet the priestess.”
”I swear if you get distracted again, Varul,” the First looked livid as he turned to face him. This was a fair criticism. He’d been briefed about the utter defeat of Varul that was concluded on the planet only half an hour ago. They almost lost the Fifth to a void blast when Liera’s battle-frame blew up the supercarrier to launch herself at the planet. The First would’ve never forgiven him if his infatuation with a woman resulted in such a great setback. The Fifth was invaluable to their fleet.
“Nothing of the sort. She also has Voider Mode. More bombs the better,” Varul deflected quickly. This was his true intention as well. He had no reason to hide any information from someone he entered a pact with.
He left his brothers to finish the augment printing and made his way to the gigantic port of the V2 Darnek. Hundreds of ships idled in separate docks, it was mostly autonomous builder swarms running recovery and salvage operations on the First’s supercarrier. His third most favorite personal ship docked in a nearby spot. The second one was debris scattered all over Ephistome III after the priestess punched a hole through it only hours earlier.
The Third walked out from the hatch wearing a blue spacesuit. The port was wide open to space and wasn’t meant for biologics. He was limping as he walked and his face was twisted into utter displeasure.
“You’re using my base-frame!” the Third remarked, he was half angry about it. He never liked when others used his body. When Varul soul transferred into the Darnek, the base-frame of the Third was the most obvious choice.
“I apologize, my brother,” He kept his tone sincere. The Third only agreed to this plan against the priestess after hours of deliberation. The plan had gone wrong in every way it could’ve gone wrong.
“I’ve had enough of your biologics. I’m in great pain!” He complained. The Third had indeed never experienced biological pain. Varul imagined this would be more than uncomfortable for him.
“We’ll swap back to ourselves very soon. Please do me one more favor and visit the medical bay, I need you to take care of my biologics before it is put back in storage.” He didn’t want to transfer into his body and suffer through the pain of all the medical procedures that awaited it. His excuse was adequate. He had pressing matters to attend to. “I would do it myself, brother, If it wasn’t for this sudden problem we’re facing right now.”
“You and your favors!” The Third shouted, walking away from him towards the airlock chambers. He was frustrated but his loyalty to the fleet never faltered.
The priestess came out, pushing his body configuration on a floating platform.
“Cinetra, take this body, run maintenance, and prepare my heaviest voider mode configuration,” He ordered his ascendant.
“Understood, my priest” Her voice echoed from the comms system. His body came to life and stepped off the platform as Cinetra piloted it away towards the armory.
“Welcome, My priestess” Varul bowed politely at Liera’s battle-frame.
“It’s been centuries since I’ve set foot in your ship,” she looked around at the port. “Somehow it’s even bigger than I remember.”
“All compliments to the Fifth. He is responsible for all manufacturing and renovations, My ideas of course.”
“Humble,” the priestess remarked in an amused voice. He knew why. He wasn’t known to be humble. Maybe time spent in his biologics had indeed changed him. Varul wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.
“I need to talk to you about something. Follow me,” He guided her toward the lobby area and reached their conference room near the command bridge. Darnek’s omni-elevators brought them to the location in under two minutes.
The priestess gazed at him through her battle-frame optics.
“You must have questions about what happened to the First,” he started. “I’ll tell you everything about it. Selus wouldn’t like it but I don’t care about his opinion at this point.” the prime minister supreme of AUM couldn’t deal with that serpent with his AUM Galactic fleets. This was a threat that only the Red Sect could handle.
“I’m curious what you found beyond the frontier that could crush a supercarrier this way. If this threat scales, we need to summon more Red Sect reinforcements to this system”
“I told you on the planet that I found Anarul,” He paused for the priestess to catch up. “I’m not totally sure if this is him, but I have my suspicions.”
“Do you mean to say a single priest crushed and twisted a supercarrier?”
“Oh no, that would be this,” Varul projected the latest scan result to the middle of the holographic space above the conference table.
”Well, I’ve arrived at the right place at the right time,” Liera said inspecting the creature reconstructed from the scan. “I’ve heard about this fearsome space snake for a while, looks like you have all the answers.”
“I beg your pardon? Where did you hear about this?”
“Commander Brenvalo. Your brother Third showed him something. It sent the poor man into a fear-induced psychosis. He hasn’t fully recovered since”
“I wasn’t aware of this. The Third behaves in eccentric ways…”
“So, start from the beginning. What is this thing?” Liera pointed at the dimensions displayed below. “This thing is the size of a moon. Nature has no reason to make such a creature. My guess is this is a gift from the progenitors.”
“I think that’s my brother,” Varul told her bluntly. “I think Anarul is in there somewhere.”
“Go back, tell me why you arrived at this absurd conclusion.”
“We found it when we jumped to that colony I told you about. The one overrun with Vervid, the one 9000 light years away from the current frontier. I went there for a reason, even though Selus funded it. It was the last location where Anarul’s beacon was fired from.”
“I see, while you were searching for Anarul, you crossed paths with Selus.”
He was glad the priestess skipped several steps for him. He only had to describe the serpent now.
“This thing was burrowed into that tar-stained planet like a worm in a fruit. The Eleventh was the first to discover it,” Varul threw another image to the table. It was the body of his Eleventh Replicant, smashed to pieces. "He lasted only six seconds in his direct confrontation."
"What is it? you must have theories? What is its purpose?"
"This is hard to tell. It is made of material that can resist Klin beams. It is hard to detect, we don't have any samples to analyze. Brother Fifth proposed this as something between a creature and a ship, a sentient vessel meant for interstellar travel."
"This is larger than any ship ever made. The numbers, Varul, they make no sense" The Priestess paused to look at the creature. Varul watched with her. He had seen it enough times to lose his fascination with it. The cross-section of the serpent alternated between square and circle along several segments of its gigantic body. It was thicker and circular at the front and thinner and cubic at the back. The numbers were indeed staggering. It had a horrendous 15km average diameter. It was 41000km in length and 9.2 million cubic kilometers in sheer volume. It made no sense how this thing could move so fast through space with no identifiable means of propulsion or a massive energy signature.
He had tried many times to harvest technology from it, but it had all gone in vain. He lost the Seventh to such a daring expedition. With the Sixth discovered dead today, he had lost three of his replicants and their expensive autonomous fleets to this space serpent.
He could understand how this creature would break a civilian's mind. His replicants often complained about feeling fear when they escaped close encounters. He hadn't faced the serpent head-on to feel it, he was always on the Darnek, firing the planet buster at the target locked by his replicants.
Somehow, it had survived three attempts. Varul had turned entire planets into asteroids before. V2 Darnek was a terrifying weapon. A celestial object of 300km diameter is nothing to the Darnek's fold emitters. But it had failed him every time he fired it at this moon-sized snake.
"My Priest and Priestess, My apologies for this interruption," Cinetra's voice came from around them. "A forward observation scan detected movement roughly 300 million kilometers away. The movement signature meets the serpent detection criteria by 57%" His fleet deployed thousands of detector drones upon arrival in a system. This movement detection came from one such probe.
"How is that even possible?" Liera asked, surprised. "Wasn't it beyond the frontier?!"
"It has the equivalent of a manifold drive. This is how it followed us from 9000 light years away," Varul snapped his fingers, dissolving the images on display. "I'm out of time. I wasn't very clear about why I think this might be Anarul. I'm assuming that because this keeps following me wherever I go."
"What do you need from me?"
"Assist us with targeting, the more eyes we have on it the better. This thing is exceedingly hard to detect. We have to kill it faster than it can repair itself and we only have three consecutive planet-buster shots."