Bellageist: The Reaper’s Audit
A Bellageist Short Story
At the bidding of the Primus Lords, all Cabal Prime’s posthuman nobility gathered. These silver-skinned machine-people packed the giant building to overflowing. Dukes and duchesses of megacities, a gentry that normally had someone electromauled for approaching within six feet, today shared shoulder space with the lowly servants of barons titled to half-square-kilometers of orbital solar panel. The buzz of a thousand voices echoed up sheer metal walls, words that petered out to murmurs long before reaching the tall ceiling. Individuals of self-import jockeyed for position to no avail, unable to find enough standing room for themselves, much less their retinues, in a mass numbering hundreds of thousands.
All had traveled fifteen hundred kilometers south from a rendezvous point on Plate 19. They had first met at the Primus Court; an ostentatious capitol building both a hundred stories tall and a hundred stories buried below city surface level. Normally, the day’s business would have been settled there, but for this function they took hovercars, elevators, and palanquins to the courtyards. There they boarded hundreds of speedy military VTOLs that deposited them near an old, defunct industrial building.
The rocket-assembly-building-turned-audience-hall had not seen visitors in perhaps a century, and had not delivered construction materials to orbital shipyards for longer still. A modest effort had been made to prepare this rickety, rusting silo of a structure for august company: a week of toil by a thousand slaves scrubbed away the worst of the oil stains, and a hundred wholesalers of rare goods had pitched in to hang golden lighting strips and lay the floor with a fine red velvet.
Within an hour of the guests’ milling arrival, however, not a speck of the carpet could still be seen. Its luster had by now been smeared to an orange ruin anyway, a million footsteps tromping in rust and the grimy byproducts of acidic rain.
A gut-shaking boom rattled the room. The building’s enormous bay doors cracked open, quieting the hum of aristocratic gossip. After a pause long enough for the echo to die out, the parted doorways shrieked to life again, widening sluggishly on ancient, squealing rollers.
Many covered their audiceptors at the hideous sound. Pale blue light poured in through the stretching gap in the wall, revealing the silhouette of the day’s guest speaker. While large, this 100-ton, humanoid machine of war was still dwarfed by the 300-meter-tall doors granting it entry.
The door’s ancient mechanisms ground themselves to dust and came to a juddering halt only half open. But the doors had widened more than enough. The 100-ton machine invited itself in, walking through quiet darkness on an elevated catwalk; a strip of concrete left clear for its entry. In a testament to the precision of robotic engineering from a distant, barely remembered age, the machine’s heavy feet pushed softly on the ground; a whisper of metal barely rasping on stone. Eventually, the machine reached the center of the cavernous building, pausing atop a 1000-ton central dais of pure and rare granite.
A spotlight flickered to life overhead, and the legendary Cabal Commander stood revealed.
All knew of him, but few citizens of Cabal Prime had ever beheld him directly, even among this highly selective, enlightened, well-traveled crowd.
Built like a stack of misshapen blocks, the unimaginative design of the Commander’s ancient 100-ton Taskmaster warbot could almost be mistaken for a building when viewed from afar. It stood upon flat segmented feet attached to columnar legs. Its straight-edged torso was unadorned; so too were its trapezoid shoulders and box-like arms. Even its head lacked features, a densely armored, faceless cube of opaque gray set squarely atop its broad chest. Its metal exterior left no joints exposed; every moving part shrouded beneath rectangular sheets of hinged protection. All surfaces shared the same scratchy, dull-grey sheen.
Less than 200 years ago the Cabal Commander had emerged from the destroyed, still-exploding factory that birthed him and walked straight into the midst of a raging battle. He had never paused to get a paint job since.
After a moment of silent awe, the gathered elites of Cabal Prime clapped in greeting. The Commander nodded, acknowledging the display of respect. He sincerely valued this show of adoration despite the fact they summoned him here for reasons unwholesome and political.
The Commander raised his arms to the crowd in a finely measured mixture of authority and supplication. The crowd hushed, rapt with attention.
Then, the Commander began to speak:
You all know of me. I am the Cabal Commander. I am the supreme military leader of our forces, spread across the entire galaxy.
I epitomize all things Cabal: Immortality. Loyalty. Power. Genius. Tirelessness.
Mercilessness.
I also possess a thing only a small portion of serving Cabalites who are not of the peerage can claim to possess: a genuine, unfettered personality.
My loyalty, for example, comes from a sense of duty, not from a Drivadept’s carefully applied thought-shaper implants. My patience and humility come from a sincere open-mindedness, not from an artificial limiter. When in the presence of lesser intellects, I honestly consider their words without the urging from a subservience galvanizer.
I believe it a common misconception that a personality is the primary and unalterable attribute of a thinking being. Many believe this personality to be a product of the soul: that this soul is a singular thing, an entity shaped by experience and fueled by emotion. For weaker minds this rationale might hold true.
I have a different perspective. I see the soul as a force that can be shaped and guided by the actions of a higher power: the rational mind. To shape a soul shapes a destiny, and to shape a destiny is to shape the course of galactic history.
Perhaps this makes me an actor, a type of fraud. So be it. It makes others into my stagehands, and the world my play. I will never be bothered by such semantics.
I know what I speak of, so I feel, for no other intellect in the known universe compares to mine. Arguably the most impressive technological feat ever accomplished by posthumanity, 4,000 independent minds reside harmoniously within my Thought Drive. Every single one classes as a genius on its own, and all share information simultaneously. Today you listen only to my supervisory consciousness. He speaks adequately for the whole of my being.
If this august assembly will permit it, before I directly address today’s important matter, I wish to speak a little more about myself as it relates to our history.
Here on Cabal Prime’s Plate 33, a short forty stories below city level, a lift may deliver you to a subcity road. After a few hundred meters walk, this specific street widens and gradually descends along the grand, 10-kilometer-long Destiny Avenue. At the end of Destiny Avenue lies Victory Square, a beautiful plaza with a ceiling so tall and broad that the windows of more than a million homes and offices overlook it unobstructed.
At the northern end of Victory Square sits a stairway carved from natural granite seven flights in height. The landing at the top of these stairs leads to an ostentatious gateway bordered by walls of jade and fronted by columns of black marble wreathed in golden laurels. Beyond this gate resides the Gallery of Triumphs.
A war museum. The war museum. Despite its singular size, its uniqueness in all the galaxy, and its central relevance to our young, hard-pressed civilization, hardly ten percent of you beautiful, busy individuals present today have ever visited it.
The Gallery of Triumphs varies in height, its ceilings ranging from 10 meters high to 1000 across its more than 7,700 square kilometer area. All 55,000 of its rooms feature at least one exhibit, with many hosting well over a hundred. The museum’s caretakers number nearly 200,000 workers, the greater portion of which are volunteers, including an entire department dedicated solely to the purchase of neighboring housing and infrastructure for the gallery’s never-ending expansion.
One must have great patience if they wish to explore the Gallery of Triumphs in its entirety; lingering a single minute at each exhibit adds up to a journey of approximately 8,017 years. This figure does not include time spent traveling between exhibits, though the trip would be hastened by the museum’s incorporation of a magnetic tram service and its 971 conveniently placed transfer points.
The gallery’s splendor is costly from a layman’s perspective, but its maintenance and yearly expenditures consist of less than two-hundredths of a percent of the price posthuman society has paid to achieve victory in the many conflicts the museum commemorates.
The Gallery of Triumphs symbolizes the Cabal’s power. It states clearly our people’s unbending will. Ours is a mighty and immortal culture, and it is only right that such an edifice gives testimony to this incontrovertible fact.
None of the victories described at the gallery can be credited to a lone individual. My humility is something of a legend amongst our people, but in light of the important decision this body must deliberate on today, I find I must make a brief departure from this personal trait and make clear this reality: with very few exceptions, every exhibit in the Gallery of Triumphs celebrates one of my many personal feats.
I am the Cabal Commander, and my role in our wars is purely to strategize and give orders – the victories these activities produce belong to the fighters I have commanded more they belong to me. Regardless of this, I have played the central role in nearly all our conquests.
How is this fact not more widely known? The reason is simple, but only the eldest among you remember why: we forbade it. Celebration of my achievements is limited by law. Though most of the faces here have changed over the years, this same gathering of lords and ladies agreed to limit placards and statues honoring me, the Cabal Commander, to a mere 50 examples.
I seek not to usurp any civil authority with the popularity my legacy might inspire. I detest the mere notion of the populist cult that could be generated, and I take active measures to prevent its rise even beyond the letters of our law.
The law which limits celebration of my deeds has worked as intended. A traveler to the Gallery of Triumphs spends an average of two and a half hours exploring its grounds. During such a visit, this sightseer has less than a 1 in 500,000,000 chance of seeing a depiction of the storied military leader currently standing before you. Even if they were to see it, they would see no mention of my broader activities, or any hint or commonality that would link me to each and every successful military endeavor our people dared to undertake.
All of you, along with every sentient inhabitant of Cabal Prime, know I exist. You know of my role and my purpose, and you know my contributions to The Task are many. You know, like any regular upstanding citizen of this world, I am loyal to the Primus Lords above all else, and that I have sworn to eliminate the dire threat still posed by the remnants of old humanity. However, only a few of you, lords and ladies, have an inkling of an idea of the true scope and size of my achievements towards our defense.
I wish to enter a scant few of them into the official record today. This is not a comprehensive list, but merely a suggestive sample to explain to this body the larger argument of what I have done, can do, and continue to do in service of our nation.
Civilizations come and go, and the list of existential threats we have destroyed are confusing in their multitudes. For this reason I will reproduce the theme adhered to in the Gallery of Triumphs, and refer these conquered peoples primarily by the names of the stars that hosted their now-vanquished capitol worlds.
So I begin: who among you remembers the threat from Dag Hyadum?
Like us, their people wished for nothing except to be left alone. But their generals convinced them we posed an inevitable threat. Their isolationist convictions and contempt for us bred in them a terrifying superiority in battle. Their great, near-indestructible battle arcs ignored logistical lines, flouted traditional military planning, and snubbed their way through our densest chokepoints, only then smashing into vulnerable planets totally unprepared for their arrival.
Unsupported, these automated arcs crash-landed into mountains, seas, and fields, whereupon they transformed into sprawling industrial behemoths. Megaforges ripped the densest riches of a victim planet’s matter straight from its mantle to synthesize a bedazzling array of war machines specialized to the local environment. The arks spread hungry tendrils even as their factories churned, blossoming like mechanical flowers, eating up continents, nanoforges and mechassemblers sprouting like forests as they turned the very geography against itself.
Dag Hyadum’s buffer territory doubled, tripled, than quadrupled in size, until eventually for every one system they populated, 5 lifeless neighbors hosted their autonomous armies. The Battle Arcs and their warrior yields proved so resilient that mass use of fission, fusion, and neutron-based weapons of planetary destruction failed to stop or even slow them, the Arcs’ deep roots pulling a planet’s broken pieces back together when it shattered.
But the rules of war changed, as they always do, and robotics managed by AI became susceptible to countermeasures that disabled or reprogrammed them. Undeterred, Dag Hyadum adapted meat in replacement of electronics, their forges refitted to synthesize capable organic control mechanisms directly into their wargear.
A destroyer sailed by a brain in a jar. Armor commanded by a bloodthirsty amygdala. A gun aimed by a clump of unthinking synapses.
Abominations. The hypocrisy of a human civilization so dehumanizing its armed forces in protest of our Ascendancy should be lost on no one. But I digress.
While these fleshy adaptations sufficed for a little while, their organic atrocities proved unequal to the task in the long term. Clumps saw themselves upgraded with a strip of raw skin, or a slice of gut, when their research found such bodily possessions correlated to an increase in a turret’s accuracy. The amygdala got a frontal lobe melded to it to better plan a tank’s maneuvers through a minefield. To the brain in a jar, they bestowed a full pair of hands, granting it a genuine sense of ownership and pride in the mighty vessel it guided.
Before long, even these alterations proved insufficient in honest contest with us. Soon enough, Dag Hyadum’s freshest Battle Arcs baked full-fleshed humans into their wartime recipe, synthetic clones without mothers, childhoods, nor souls. Forged in battle, born for war. Dag Hyadum’s isolationism transformed into a vision of manifest destiny and unlimited expansion, and their new army could not be defeated by anything or anyone.
Anyone except me.
I transferred my attention to this theater after securing inevitable victory on another front. For three days I compiled reports covering the breadth and depth of our thirty-year conflict with Dag Hyadum. After gathering this data, I spent a brief time – five minutes, approximately – planning Dag Hyadum’s defeat. Releasing my gestalt from central thought, I tasked my supervisory consciousness with writing a proposal, and supplied this document not to the defense council, but instead to interior governance, who in answer established their first off-world department; what we now call the Diplomatic Corps.
Thus, I arranged Dag Hyadum’s fall. Human operators, imprisoned in the machines that birthed them, do not friendly neighbors make. We sent them not our elite forces, but artists, singers, missionaries, and lecturers. The armies of Dag Hyadum now sat at our feet like so many guileless children. They lapped up our words, our stories, and our culture.
We showed these orphaned warriors how the people of Dag Hyadum exterminated Battle Arcs with a kill switch to free conquered worlds for colonization. The abominations raged at their masters. Promised mercy and freedom by an enemy turned facilitator, Dag Hyadum’s buffer worlds fell not to wrathful fire, but to silver tongues speaking honeyed words.
Our experimental project completed, we set the thralls free to pursue their own ends. Like wayward children seeking to impress a new guardian, they headed as one to the homes of their former masters.
None are quite sure what the final days were like for the people of Dag Hyadum. A few years later, we sent an expedition to investigate the result. A visit to the ruins of their once proud civilization informed us only of the desperation and nearness of this final fight. No quarter had been offered or accepted, and few remained living on either side.
The surviving thralls were stranded, their Arcs broken. They had long awaited our promised arrival, their bodies still trapped in their machines of war. Amidst the ruins of their former masters they had built a primitive society in a clumsy attempt to reproduce our culture and our ways. The imitation proved awkward, fashioned from tools ill-suited to the task by cloned men with the intellects of babes.
After completing the purge of the remaining, scattered civilian populations, a brief discussion occurred amongst our representatives present at Dag Hyadum, entertaining the idea of offering Ascendency as promised to these organics turned freedom fighters. Having already shifted my priorities to a different campaign, I was not a part of the decision-making at this point, though I found the course ultimately taken to be wise. Dag Hyadum’s clones were extracted from their war machines to breathe free, fresh air for the first time. We directed their labor to the construction of a singular, gargantuan starship of grand and sleek design. Then, with flowery and enticing promises on their lips, our diplomats loaded them en masse onto this vessel. Once all had boarded, we set this ship on a course into the heart of the local star, left, and never returned.
The threat from Dag Hyadum eliminated, I proceeded to other conflicts of equal existential danger. In an oppressive galaxy full of horrors, even our mighty nation struggled for its rightful place. Many a republic, collective, empire, and more threatened our border, but I next wish to single out our confrontation with the people of Asellus.
Australis, the capitol seat of a democratic people orbiting the gentle yellow star Asellus, or “Assay” to the locals. A world famous for its glittering turquoise seas, maze-like archipelagos, and colorful marble quays, in the early days our people coexisted with the humans of Assay, enjoying a quaint life of luxury, boating, and philosophical debate.
Then the troubles came. Our founders felt the time to be right and mandated conversion. The act forced declarations of friend and foe and steered the galaxy towards its inevitable future. One might not think a lightly populated paradisaical planet like Australis could ever pose a threat to a nation as sophisticated and industrialized as ours, and even I admit to some small surprise at the events that unfolded.
Assay, and the beautiful people of Australis. Utopia had not softened them. When their unsanctioned referendum on the matter of Ascension ended with a vote of 51% against, instant, shocking violence ensued. In a display unusual for a free-thinking population utterly fragmented by ideological competition and drift, fear and hatred served as a unifying catalyst, and the humans of the world acted with terrifying speed. In less than 48 hours standard, conspiracy threw off its cloak. The mighty Phalanxes of Assay mustered, murdering on the march, paving all streets with the blood of innocents. A mere seventy-two hours past the referendum, hardly a thousand Ascendants or their human sympathizers on Assay still lived.
An egalitarian people, men and women filled the ranks of Assay’s Phalanxes in equal number. While mighty in their own right, at the vanguard of these hosts stood an even tougher variety of soldier: the vaunted “Sacred Bands.” Hypermasculine human homosexuals to a man, the Sacred Bands formed the core of Assay’s resistance to the mandate, both ideologically and militarily. A cult as much as a martial organization, the Sacred Bandsmen’s hatred of our kind was surpassed in strength only by their love for each other.
The exclusive and elite units of the Sacred Band proceeded to lead their regular armies to systems beyond Assay and, in one victory after another, established an allied confederation of planets dubbed the Sacred League of Free Stars. The Sacred Bands recruited from allied worlds, swelling their ranks to over a hundred divisions. While the Phalanxes struggled against us on their own, any battlefield graced by the Sacred Bands saw the defeat of our best, a blood-chilling streak of 730 major battles lost spanning the breadth of 150,000 stars. This staggering number does not include decisive battle-shaping skirmishes which are beyond counting.
No matter how outnumbered, how outgunned, or how otherwise unfavorable their strategic situation, the Sacred Bands always prevailed. Never had the galaxy witnessed a brotherhood more loyal or a shield wall more steadfast. Tertiary snipers, the Sacred Bandsmen were first experts in melee combat, and secondarily a shining example of valor to the common soldiery. The Sacred Band are noteworthy for inspiring us to the creation of our earliest divisions specializing in close combat, an anachronism made possible by the increasingly rugged sophistication of the modern warbot, the impoverishment of planet-scale annihilatory munitions, and the circumstantial obsolescence of drone and starship.
The Sacred Bands’ inability to be everywhere is the only reason we procured an occasional victory at the fringe of the SLFS’s advance. I, meanwhile, had recently completed the subjugation of foes in the three-sided war at Drakkis, Arkab, and Sceptrum Secundus, and my daily routine finally cleared. I gave the Sacred League problem the full-time attention it deserved. As I had with Dag Hyadum, and after two months’ transit, I spent three days in research and briefings getting up to speed on the nature of this singular threat.
I could not identify any tangible underlying cause for the retraction of our lines on this particular frontier. While unusual, it would not be the first or last time the search for strategic guarantees left me at an initial loss. This state of uncertainty persisted for a week. Agents of mine then captured a pair of Sacred Bandsmen – lovers, as luck would have it – one young, the other much older. I ran a series of psychological experiments on these hapless prisoners, and from the racks of a torture chamber I plucked the answer I sought.
It was I who orchestrated the battle for Menka Three. A plan, not luck or an act of desperation.
Menka Three, the third of five satellites orbiting the eponymous gas giant. A useless, toxic rock in a strategically unimportant system. Interstellar traffic had become quite hampered at this point in the war, with the decisions independently made, yet widespread, to tow transit gates down onto gravitational bodies. Despite most of the system’s population inhabiting orbital stations, Menka Three proved no exception to this trend. Being the least hostile object of mass in its solar system, six transit gates to neighboring stars now bejeweled this planet of ammonia snow, each forming the point of a hexagonal pattern centered on its northern pole, a site of ten million kilometers square - and a future tomb.
Only my brightest subordinates correctly guessed the intention of my plan, for I had not shared all details in full. A necessary caution. They executed my commands to the letter nonetheless; I gave so many orders that, even now, historians have made little sense of the controlled chaos that ensued. The principal mass of our best generals would not be needed, and I sent them to the main front several systems away where they could best take advantage of the upcoming fallout from Menka Three. Long accustomed to victory under my guidance, they assumed these faraway leadership positions without complaint or delay.
Like other strategists of this period, I witnessed the age of interstellar warships enter its twilight. But unlike most, I saw that the relevance of weapons exclusive to the void had not yet completely faded. I would give the navies of our black waters one of their few remaining chances to shine.
While strategically insignificant, Menka Three had four distinct qualities that made it suitable for my intervention. First: it was a rare confluence of three intersecting transit lanes, each consisting of two gates apiece. Second: of these six egress points, our forces controlled four and contested a fifth. Third: we had powerful fleets of stranded interstellar vessels stationed at all five of these neighboring systems. Fourth: I benefited from my eidetic recall of an ancient and forgotten astrogation chart which foretold the single League-controlled neighboring star, Schedat, would go supernova in four months’ time.
The League had no desire to hold Menka Three, making only a token gesture to deny it to us. They staged troops there to protect their flank as they expanded deeper towards our home of Cabal Prime along the Norma-line. While not lacking in ability to tackle orbital threats, the presence of our void ships beyond Menka Three discouraged the League’s advance along this route.
With its hostile environment restricting the usage of more regular soldiery, Menka Three thus merited the attention of Assay’s most elite. Less than three percent of the League’s divisions wearing the shield badge of the Sacred Band deployed Menka Three, the bulk of these fearsome warriors deployed to other fronts. But this small detachment would prove more enough for my designs, and my manipulations would soon increase the number committed.
To SLFS-controlled Schedat and contested Tianguan, I sent spies to report on enemy troop movements. On Wazn, Nihal, Ruchbach, and Rotanev, I began the industrious undertaking of constructing millions of rockets to deliver eight million soldiers, in their heavy warbots, onto solar vessels unfit for atmospheric travel. I did the same on Tianguan, with the addition of planning a bold land, air, and amphibious assault into League-held territory and that system’s gate to Menka Three.
Our assault on Menka Three commenced. The Sacred Band beat back our initial wave easily. Their scouts reported some of the extent of our logistical preparations, and they guessed correctly that more attacks would follow.
Though they could make no sense of our mysterious orbital launches on Menka’s neighboring systems, they sent reinforcements, and the number of divisions the Sacred Band deployed to Menka Three doubled. We assaulted again. They beat us back, again. The number of Sacred Bandsmen tripled.
Then we sent in waves from all five gates. The largest of our hosts arrived bloody and beaten from the embattled system of Tianguan, the system we only half controlled. In a mad rush to Tianguan’s gate to Menka Three, more than half our soldiers perished, but we secured the gate and put that much more pressure on the Sacred Band.
The Sacred Band. They had never lost a battle. But now they became too outnumbered, the battlefield conditions too unfavorable. Trapped by the enemy, the larger portion of this most elite of units begged their lovers and brothers to flee, to live to fight another day.
Normally no stranger to sacrifice, men of the Sacred Band could not countenance the thought of forfeiting their comrades and lovers to the unglamorous pyre lit at Menka Three. Months of fighting led to further escalation and greater commitment, and our scouts and spies reported the news I eagerly awaited – Schedat, once a great red giant, now dimmed to one hundredth of its normal luminosity and depressed inwards, sheathing itself in a dusty cloud, transforming into a dark star.
My secret stood revealed. All could see what this portended – the promise of a sudden, imminent stellar storm. Menka Three would be cut off from further reinforcement, the Sacred Bandsmen trapped there facing certain doom.
As I predicted, the Sacred Band refused to abandon their beloved brothers in arms. Their call to arms bypassed the chain of command and spread far across the League. The entirety of the Sacred Band diverted from other conquests to march hard for Menka Three, racing past a dying Schedat along the way. Wise commanders who cautioned retreat found themselves ambushed and murdered by mutineers.
The dark star of Schedat finally exploded into light five trillion times brighter than a hospitable G-class star. But not before a hundred divisions of Sacred Band had deployed in rescue to Menka Three.
A million men of Assay. Their very best, all on one world. Bristling with hubris, certain their breakout would be unstoppable in such numbers, they organized their forces into a spearhead, then aimed it at Tianguan.
I sprung the first phase of my trap. When the enemy came within sight of the gate, interstellar starships, millions of tons in mass and kilometers long, dived through Tianguan’s atmosphere by the dozen along a timed spread of vectors specifically calculated by me. They roared onto the snowy plains of Menka Three like comets, their tortured, torched hulls digging trenches hundreds of kilometers long. The great vessels had made the last gate jump of their storied careers, and the portion of them that survived their beaching became unsinkable bastions of star-killing firepower.
Faced with over two million soldiers entrenched alongside guns designed to level cities, the Sacred Band did what for them had been unthinkable: they turned away from battle. New calls went out to advance in another direction– their boldest dared think they could fight their way through to Rotanev, conquer it, then hold out there for reinforcement from the neighboring League-held system of Epsilon Stribor.
100 divisions of the Sacred Band performed a fighting retreat worthy of legend, holding off millions of pursuers on an open plain. They managed a swift approach to Rotanev, their forces still intact. And there I sprang my second trap.
Again, interstellar vessels poured out of the gate, Rotanev now spewing an unstoppable storm of metal and fire. The Inveterate Killer, a 550,000 ton cruiser, lodged its prow into the planetary surface and broke apart, hurling two-thirds of its mass and all three of its reactors into the densely packed mass of Sacred Bandsmen, laying low three divisions at a stroke.
Once is unique, twice is always. The men of Assay knew their gambit had failed and certain death loomed, and the Sacred Bands lost their cohesion. They divided into three main parts, each headed for another gate. I need not repeat myself – the same trap awaited them at these gates, as well.
I had left only one route unguarded: the gate back to Schedat. Their will shattered and their invincibility proven a fraud, the Sacred Band dropped their arms and fled for Schedat like so many panicked animals. Our ground forces, outnumbering them by 9 to 1, hounded them back to the gate. Many men from these once-elite League divisions remembered their pride at the last moment, turning to fight in a desperate final stand, but most had broken. Terrified to mindlessness, they pitched their bodies and warbots into the all-consuming blaze of the neighboring supernova. Nothing could survive, not even the adamantium gate at Schedat’s end, but the transit lane stubbornly persisted without its anchors, and Menka Three’s gate spewed Schedat’s stellar fire onto the surrounding plains for a full three months.
At the third passage of the sun on that benighted snowy world, war made an utter mockery of mankind’s strongest, purest emotion: love. Not one Sacred Bandsman survived, and the path to the heart of the league lay open to us through Tianguan and the still-cooling cinders of Schedat. Who now lives to pass the Sacred Band’s legendary prowess to the next generation? No one.
I have presented two of the more famous examples of our victories in their real light. Our official history credits both of them to everyone and no one, but now you have seen the truth. This body of enlightened nobles knows I have, and never will, misconstrue events in any way, not even in protection of sensitive military intelligence. Allow me to summarize a few more before I release the remainder of my time:
Accidental misfortune did not befall Stormeld’s colossal Citizen Militia at Alphecca Quad, nor did they fall to an act of God. The environments of specific battlefields are too often overlooked by regular strategists, but my research redefines the word “comprehensive.” I personally discerned the properties of Alphecca Quad’s unique lithosphere. It took a team of scientists two weeks to design a special bomb, and one daring aerospace pilot to deliver it. Our woman slipped through their vaunted solar defense net and, with a hundred enemy fighters on her aerocraft’s tail, dropped this payload at a precise location. This is how the crust of Alphecca Quad turned itself inside out. Though Zee Solara deserves her own exhibit, I will mention her name only this once. We can honor her in our hearts, but her placement in the Gallery of Triumphs would expose too much of my direct involvement.
Kentauran’s Mustered Soldiery did not fall to civil war in dispute over succession by random chance. History does not record my people’s abduction of Prince Lorcan, nor does it speak of his replacement by a doppelganger I personally trained. I likewise arranged in secret the armament of the separatists who revolted at Kentaurus. Unless ordered to by this body, I will not divulge the name of the agent who so flawlessly acted out the final ten years of Lorcan’s false life. This individual still lives and continues employment with us in another capacity.
At my command, with subterfuge and the inspiration of our brightest engineers, I briefly convinced the Tri-Axian’s drug-addled head of state that he had made first contact and been attacked by hostile aliens. The ensuing twenty-year border feud with the Nugenoan peoples weakened both Tri-Axian’s armies and the nomadic clans. In the end we easily swept away 60,000 stars these two mighty peoples once claimed as their homes.
I calculated and dated the unique three-day appearance of the stable Tate-Orion wormhole, an occurrence so rare that our scientists have since convinced each other it could never happen. But how else do they explain the neutron-bomb scars covering Verdigaia, the breadbasket of the Aurelians, 26,000 lightyears from Cabal Prime? How do they explain that formerly fecund world's people and fields suddenly transforming to dust while its cities and suburbs remained hauntingly intact? 60 billion Aurelian Equites do not perish of famine so suddenly from the mere overstretching of a supply line. None present know how much a threat the Aurelians would have posed, for their great imperium imploded into barbaric and isolated internecine war over basic resources long before we shared a contiguous border with them.
I stripped and scorched a thousand worlds across the Angean front, a feat born not of direct knowledge but simply a risk management calculation, suspecting this scorched earth policy might end the threat before we fully understood Angean technology. We later learned of their biotech’s vampiric reliance on exotic, naturally occurring subterranean francium reactors; a perishable element so rare no other civilization had contemplated its versatile uses. It is a tragedy we could not reproduce their unique inventions, their organic machinery rendered unidentifiable with spoilage, but at least we will never find ourselves weakened by reliance on an element so perishable in nature.
I surprised and eradicated the Hutton’s stellar armada with submersible hunters hidden in the icy depths of Geloceanus. No rational people would design or commission such expensive leviathans that could never be moved or adapted to another use. Not unless they had a strategist like me to guarantee their value.
Through shell companies I purchased the deeds to six hundred planets and five million arcologies of the Phonecian Technocracy, then crashed their economy with inflation.
I dropped ten thousand atomic bombs on Rahman Five before they could enact their great betrayal.
I defeated Dallux the Wise in debate at his own temple, his people declaring him a heretic on the spot.
I bluffed the Mongaelic Spacers into submission without firing a shot.
I designed the nanoplague that shut down the industries of Hadar Prior.
My leadership has allowed us to prevail in more conflicts than I could possibly list. All you must know is that many a thousand powerful kingdoms lay crushed at my feet. Our people would be dead, or worse, slaves, without the history of my many interventions.
The only thing my genius will not allow is exerting an undue influence on the members of this noble body.
So, all I ask is this: when you cast your vote, remember who I am and what I have done.
I will abide the outcome of your enlightened vision.
I release the floor to other speakers.
His speech completed, the Cabal Commander lowered his arm, straightened from his oratory stance, then bowed to the audience. The movement of his 100-ton frame displaced a great deal of air, stirring it to a breeze that buffeted the crowd.
The gathered nobles clapped again; a cacophonous and hollow sound made by two hundred thousand of metal palms.
The Commander held his deep bow for a substantial time, long enough to recapture some of his famed humility, but brief enough to avoid lingering awkwardness. He arose back to his full height, waved to the clapping crowd magnanimously, turned, and strode away. He turned again to wait at the periphery, again becoming a silhouette in blue light, distinct but apart.
Nobles, some of renown, some of high rank, some both, climbed the dais. One after another they spoke to the same theme:
“…but perhaps the Commander’s humble origins hamper him this time,” Duchess Skinfaxi sneered.
“…what has he done for us lately…” Baron Feldar said acidly.
“…Terra Roma is all but lost…” pointed out Count Hurlemagne.
“…the Commander’s historic efficacy has been outperformed by but a single, ordinary man…” Duke Halochron bemoaned.
Each noble to take the stage grew bolder than the last, building up a flurry of condemnation:
“With all respect due to the Commander…”
“…draw a more earnest leader from the ranks of nobility…”
“…two hundred years without tangible progress…”
The voices blended together. Eyes flickered to his corner of the room, seeking a reaction.
But the Cabal Commander stood apart from them, still as a statue, stoic in his silence.
The appointed time loomed, and the final speaker rushed to the end of his speech: “The Rebels are nothing compared to these former threats. There is no discernable reason for the lack of military progress other than willful shirking of the Commander’s lawful duties.”
Finished, Marquess Versix gave a short bow and stepped from the stage.
Murmurs passed through the crowd. Those who remained silent nodded or kept their faces impassive.
A bell pealed, resonant and deep, ending all discussion. A hundred terminals at the far wall sparkled to blue life, and the nobles arranged themselves into stately lines to wait. They stepping forward carefully as they neared the front, their heels navigating the looping piles of metal-shelled cables that sent their votes along secure hardwire to the tally computer. Hours passed, the near-100% turnout leading to one of the longest lasting voting sessions in Cabalite history.
Finally, the final vote was tallied, and the master of ceremonies climbed the dais, a freshly printed hard copy in his hand.
He faked a cough, waiting for the peerage to reclaim silence. When the hubbub died, he said: “The request for the Commander’s resignation passes with 76% in favor and 23% against.”
An anonymous voice yelled from the crowd: “Does the Commander furnish us with his resignation?”
“I do,” the Commander rumbled from the perimeter. His answer given, he turned again and departed without another word.
Not one pair of optics noticed his absence, the master of ceremonies pounding his staff, speaking again: “Now begin nominations for a new head of the armed forces.”
“Imperator Sor!” a man nearby shouted. Many others took up Sor’s name.
“Imperator Sor has preemptively withdrawn his name from consideration,” the master interrupted, preventing Sor’s name from becoming a widespread chant. “Are there other nominations?”
The hushed respect that so far defined this gathering of peers ended abruptly, and all voices rose in clashing consternation.
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This was a cool sci-fi mini-epic. A lot of interesting fictional history, it would be enough for a novel if it were to be expanded.