Trials

Maria

Date: August 2815

Lieutenant Hasiq al-Mas, late of the Imperial Knights, nursed a glass of the finest wine this cafe had to offer and gazed sullenly at the sun setting over the Bay. The sea breeze whistled through the slats of the canopy, which were further disturbed by the stomping of heavy feet.

It was a Minotaur, striding slowly through the streets of Francisco-Oakland, causing the ground to tremble with each booming step. Weapons hung from the shoulders of the massive vehicle, quad EMP cannons firing up into the air at a forty-five degree angle. It was a convincing show of the Empire's might, and the cheering civs trailing along behind the vehicle were duly appreciative of this evidence of the Emperor's protective wings.

The Immortal, snug in his gel bath half a world away, probably did not care a bit for the residents of this city, and saw them as little more than a stumbling block to trip up the Cybrids when they attacked.

It seemed that the Emperor cared even less for the peripheral cities' Knights forces. F-O, Vanseattle, Aleutia, Limaplex, all the Pacific Knights garrisons were being downsized to cluster the main forces farther inland in the Eurasia-Africa continent. Nova Alexandria was all. The Emperor had to save his own worthless hide.

Hasiq did not bother suppressing the treasonous thoughts. Who cares? It didn't matter if someone committed treason or not; if the Imperial command thought they did, they did and would suffer the appropriate consequence. He himself had been delegated to dispense "justice" recently enough. The memory of the difficult sword fight with the older Knight he had slain last month filled his mind. The man had outfought one of his comrades even with a severed hand, and Hasiq had had to watch as one of his best friends fell to a quick strike from the traitor's sword.

He'd dropped the man's wife, whom he had been holding back during the battle, and with his squire had attacked the tired man and killed him. And then his squire had killed the man's wife.

At this development, Hasiq had protested, but the squire had dismissed him, his master, with a harsh comment about not wanting to kill two traitors that day. Then a little girl had screamed,

He and his squire chased the girl up the stairs, whereupon she jumped out a window to escape. Then they followed the child into the forest behind the house, finally catching her a few hundred meters to the east, tangled in branches and weeds and sobbing with pain and terror.

He had scowled at the squire, ignoring his suggestion to let the child die, and insisted that she be taken, well, somewhere.

They took her back to the garrison, and the captain ordered that the child be kept sedated until they figured out a humane way of erasing her. The captain was a decent sort, hence his concern for the girl, but the squire’s report of Hasiq's dissent had infuriated him.

"I'll not suffer someone under my command to question the orders of His Majesty!" the aging Knight had thundered, and Hasiq had been court-martialed the next day. He was found guilty quickly, and Hasiq supposed he owed his captain some gratitude for insisting for the courts-martial to lessen the sentence from death to dishonorable discharge.

This was done, and Hasiq's face burned with shame as he recalled standing under the blazing sun while his fellow Knights had, without a trace of expression, stripped him of every medal, insignia, weapon, and scrap that connected him with the Knights, and then walked away to leave him standing there with his uniform in tattered shreds blowing in the wind.

Hasiq spit on the ground next to the table as he glared at the Minotaur's gaily decorated back receding into the sunset. That squire. He had volunteered to "escort" the child to her destination, exile on one of the colonies. Hasiq recalled the sneer on Rykard Sels's face as he had informed Hasiq of his new assignment, patrol duty around the Antipode Colony on Mercury. Hasiq's lip had curled with disdain. Assignment to such a place was as bad a punishment as Hasiq's loss of commission; unfortunately those who were assigned to such lousy duties were generally too stupid to realize the magnitude of their error... at least not for a few years when all their requests for transfer were denied...

Hasiq was a civilian now. The assets he had earned as part of the Knights were understandably forfeit, but unlike most would be in his position, he was not broke at all. His father had passed on a good fraction of the family's weapons production stocks to him several years ago, and though his father had disowned him and refused to give him even his own personal property back at the estate, he had enough money from the interest and gains on the stock to set himself up very nicely indeed.

He even had sufficient funding to arrange transport off world. He had to get to Mercury. He had some scores to settle.

-----

Date: May 2825

"Chief?" Lieutenant Jesses gestured to the diagrams he held in his hand. "Chief? I have those schematics you requested."

Finally the heavyset, sturdy figure in the chair swiveled the chair to look at him. "Yes, what is it?" the man snapped, angry fire flashing in his eyes. Behind him, the situation map blinked little lights on and off, crawling across Mars.

"The schematics. The ones that scientist was working on." The lieutenant offered the sheaf of metaplas to his superior, who snatched them with a suspicious glare.

The chief ran his thick fingers slowly over the lines and scribbled notes on the blue sheets, raised an eyebrow. "Well," he said cheerfully. "It looks like this is gonna work after all."

Jesses smiled thinly. "I told you so, sir."

"How soon can these things be ready?"

"Two days, sir. I've already spoken to the relevant engineer."

"Good, good... make sure he does the job right. And when he does..."

"Kill him," Jesses said bluntly, fingering the pistol on his belt.

"Now I know why I appointed you as my advisor," Navarre said, his eyes devouring the schematics as his left hand tapped a nervous staccato on the maps in the desk.

Jesses left quickly, thinking of how precarious his situation was. Navarre was a lunatic, which is why he wanted the particular devices the scientist had designed. Jesses hoped that the man would accidentally plug himself into one of the horrific contraptions.

Perhaps it was stupid acting like a scared puppy trying to please his master, but that's how their relationship went. Navarre yelled, he whined, Navarre said jump, he asked what the gravity was so he could calculate his trajectory properly.

He had to get off Mars. Navarre would get tired of him soon enough, and Jesses would probably end up testing the horror machines for him.

But at least the monstrosities would probably keep the chief busy long enough for his visa to Mercury to clear...

-----

Date: May 2827

That damned woman.

It was about time she left, Hernandez thought with a grunt. He pushed the pallet into the mining tunnel's main entrance, careful not to snag his scarab on the jagged granite that surrounded the door. It was bad enough the scorching thing was ten years out of date and the pressure of the deep, liquidy atmosphere had smashed the seals flat; he did not need to damage the control panels as well.

If that damned woman hadn't meddled, he would not have had to worry about it. The bioderm scum would be doing everything and he'd be basking in the simulated sunlight of his office.

Damned, damned woman.

Suki was her name, he recalled. From Sa Thauri or somewhere thereabouts. She disliked the bioderms even as he himself did, but insisted on the stupid belief that they were people. She'd protested every single damned regulation he had in place in Hephiastus, and managed to raise enough of a stink that the bigwig teddies had made him change them. He was stuck with a lower production rate, and he was barely able to meet the goddamned Imp quotas much less have any profit left over.

Damned woman.

She transferred to Hephiastus's molybdenum/europium mines over near Ishtar a few weeks ago. She was working on the emancipation of the damned bioderms over there too, so he heard. He snorted, shoving the heavy pallet into the jack that would take it down the mine shaft, and then standing on top of the stack as the lift descended. Good luck indeed, if she thought the Ishtarians would listen to any of her highborn, aristocratic bull. If she thought the damned bioderms were the salt of Venus and wanted to wage war on the terrible and unjust oppression, let her. He was doing his own negotiations with the teddies, and they were starting to see things his way again.

Despite, damnit, the attempted rape charge. He'd managed to buy the local law enforcement off himself after she'd filed that on him (damned woman!) so he wasn't thrown out into the acid like would have happened if he'd been under Venusian jurisdiction, but it was costly, and it made the teddies regard him with even more scorn than they regarded most of the rockgrubbers like himself. It hardly helped that the charge was attempted rape; they regarded him with even more scorn when they realized he had been unable to even pull it off. She'd tricked him and he had ended up with a nice knife wound rather than what he was trying for... Damned woman...

The lift struck bottom with a jolt and he found himself on the mine's lowest level. He pushed the pallet off the jack and into the tunnel.

With an eager roar, the lumbering, muscle-bound giants dropped their equipment (damn their carelessness; the stuff was expensive! he raged silently) and leapt for the boxes of ration bars like the ravenous animals they were.

The teddies might order him to feed them more, but who could tell? He bought all the rations they expected him to and kept the excess to sell off under the table to the cities. That gave him a nice bit of pocket change the teddies couldn't keep track of too well.

He was tired of Venus. Molybdenum was all well and good, but he could mine platinum, mercury, heavy metals, and bulk staples on Mercury for a hell of a lot less cost than he could scrape Venus's guts for. Hephiastus was expanding operations to Mercury with the new nanite-based mining methods, and he had decided to get out as soon as he could.

Suki was supposed to be returning to Hephiastus in a few weeks. He'd be certain to get out before that damned woman came back.

-----

Date: July 2831

Caves of crystalline ice, more jagged clefts than caves, sheltered the pirates' small collection of HERCs and drone vehicles as the firefight raged outside. The Ice Stalkers, they called themselves most of the time. Sometimes it was the Frozen Bad-Asses. No matter. They did what they did and they were good at it, and no one had yet been able to stop them.

Nor would they, the leader thought with a smug grin.

Once upon a time the seven of them had been Imperial Knights, assigned to a small unit near the Grand Canal. The Cybrids had changed that. When their battered little collection of Talons had returned to base, they found themselves in the middle of a nest of glitches. Logically, they ran, heading for the most distant known settlement far out among the jumbled ice of Europa's south pole.

They had no interest in taking the native's offer of trade: food for their vehicles. What was the sense in that? They demonstrated just how foolish they thought the idea with a few well-placed compression-laser blasts to the settlements' main domes, and simply took the food.

They would have been well enough off there, but the Cybrids had landed and flushed them out.

Their Talons were fast, and they escaped again (losing only two of their number) and hid out in the main cavern systems beneath the ice at the equator. The caverns were mostly the result of holing the bottom of the ice sheet, and many of them were filled with water that flowed much more vigorously than one would think looking at the icy surface. They had to be careful not to enter any watercave without properly testing the currents, and even the vacuumcaves could rapidly be filled if their HERCs' footsteps damaged the ice structure.

This, then, was their base: the vast network of subterranean holes in the ice that formed the second of Europe’s four Layers: Ice, Underice, Sea, Basement.

The Stalkers had made enough of a living for themselves, plundering the various hidden cities in the caverns, that they didn't even need a set base, which was good, since half the planet was out for their blood. Their last trick might have done it, though, might have pushed the scattered communities from hatred to berserker rage. They'd sicced a Cybrid force on a small caravan transporting food synthesizers (Europa's most valuable commodity) to a Tarazedi Alliance base at the border of Talesin Crater. The Stalkers did severe damage to the caravan, killing or wounding over a dozen, and were forced to leave as a bubble of Tarazedi forces came up out of the ice.

Even the Ice Stalkers had no interest in messing with the 'Zeds. They not only had a ferocious amount of firepower (being Europa's last visible human presence they had to) but they were able to increase their force even farther by converting Cybrid HERCs, a trick the Ice Stalkers had given up on trying. The Stalkers once had three times as many pilots, but they had spent a dozen, a dozen, Talons trying to capture a single Tarazedi Executioner. The black-and-red, bug like construct had lost shields by the time the thirteenth and final surviving Stalker had fled. And now the 'Zeds, a rather driven bunch anyway, were on the warpath for the Frozen Bad-Asses.

The 'Zeds had made one mistake. That was to leave a Conveyor landed on the surface without escort. It had taken some serious convincing to get the Conveyor to do what they wanted; the controls inside were so bizarre the Stalker's tech wasn't able to even figure out how to work them much less how to hack them. Instead, they gutted the 'Zed equipment and were replacing it with their own.

Commander Zeni scowled. The self-destruct device had malfunctioned, and that was the only reason the Ice Stalkers remained. The 'Zeds had stuffed deadman-switched munitions all over the Conveyor's power plant. Zeni was still unsure why the system had glitched and unfastened the munitions, but he was certainly not complaining.

The caravan, and the screams of the young woman who had been in charge of it, came back to him. Screams in vacuum were unsettling, because there was no sound. There was only blood pouring from the screamer's mouth. Something in the sight, though, was compelling and Zeni could not turn his eyes away. She'd cursed him as she died, venom in her eyes and oaths on her lips that would never again form words. But it was the thought that counts.

He had the woman's nametag. It said "Rider", and it matched several pictures that were displayed in the lead vehicle's cockpit. Zeanian Rider. Kaclain Rider of the Imperial Knights. Zeni smirked. God forbid word of that get out; he'd not want to have to duel some Knight because he'd been hungry and had to kill his sister for her food synthesizer.

It didn't matter. Soon enough the Conveyor would be fixed, and if the Stalkers could get it out of the Jovian Defense Perimeter, they'd be free to go wherever they pleased.

Maybe Mercury. Zeni was sick of all this ice...

-----

Date: October 2834

The Antipode Mining Guild was on its own, except for the bare handful of mercs they had been able to buy off with nearly their entire credit line. The Emperor would have been livid and demanded their heads on platters, but the Emperor was too far away for them to give a damn.

The Cybrids were coming in, and the Guild was busy packing it into transports with the intention of running to Fantasma and begging the Ghosts to let them in. They knew that at least death at the hands of the Ghosts (or if they were feeling sufficiently tired, the banks of missile launchers that were rumored to cover the colony entrance) would at least be quicker than whatever the Cybrids would do to them.

"West Crater Point! I see them! Six hundred meters and closing, looks like Executioners and Goads." Sels's own Minotaur bucked as the first impacts from the Cybrid railguns struck the shields. "Damn, they have our range already!"

Hernandez snapped orders to the two bioderm workers outside the compound, busily moving tonnes of equipment off the cargo transports so they would be able to move at a sufficient speed to have something of a chance at escape. It wasn't working very well, and he cursed the inhuman beings as they glanced up at him with anger in their eyes. Anger? At him? The gall of the creatures! "Come on, move it out there!"

Zeni's Talon, loaded with stolen blasters, took up point for the small formation as they charged at the Cybrid vehicles. Jesses, busy stacking boxes with the built-in winch in his suit, to take along. Food synthesizers, machines that Zeni and Hasiq had proven themselves quite adept at repairing, fortunately. It was bad enough having to dig three hundred meters for water. Lacking food would have been an insoluble problem.

The Executioners fanned out, and as the miners inside the compound watched, were taken out with a mass of shots to the ground in front of them.

Hernandez swore viciously. He'd never seen the Cybrids do that before. The human vehicles were quickly toppled as they tripped over the falling crater rim to topple into the cavity's bowl. "Damnit! Let's move it, move it! Drop the scorching things and let's move, move!" Hernandez checked the seal on his suit one final time and ran for the door, followed by several dozen workers waiting for the transports to drive up to the door to minimize their exposure.

The transports exploded in showers of sparks and green light. Missiles.

Hernandez, Jesses, and the others looked at one another in terrible understanding.

And then the wall went down.

Hernandez looked up at a looming Seeker, its weapon mounts gone. The vehicle's legs bristled with small guns, and with a myriad little flashes, they fired.

Feeling stinging pain in his stomach, leg, and arm, he looked down to see blood on his suit. Three small darts were embedded in the suit, flashing with code patterns.

He fell to the floor, paralyzed. Behind the Seeker, an Executioner with a row of hatches on the side squatted, and the metallic spiders of pilotforms leapt out and proceeded toward the fallen miners with a terrible purpose.

-----

Date: August 2897

Maria glared into the singularity dancing around the Sanctum and waited for the right moment. The Liberated Elite (pilotforms? cyborgs? people?) force that had recently landed on Mercury from one of Serenity's moons had quickly been captured by the CZG, and it had taken Maria several hours of arguing with Admiral Mee to realize that the old woman was not about to hand over the prisoners. A hundred ten years old, the other still had a commanding presence despite her somewhat age-weakened appearance. "I said no and that's final!" Mee had snapped in a voice that had lost none of its command with age. "The prisoners are military prisoners of war, requiring a specific set of interrogation procedures, and requiring proper adherence to our Articles of War that we signed with them, the Tarazedi, the Faction, and all those when you brought us here. We cannot just abandon our laws because you think you have a better idea!"

Maria had smiled faintly and left. Permission denied: very well, she would proceed to the next step.

The singularity showed the inside of the prison cell, down in the Core. The fifteen captured beings were sitting in a circle, apparently communing through their telepathic/electronic links. Maria scowled. There were only five of them she was interested in. It would take some tricky maneuvering to get them...

The beings looked up with their red-and-black CCD-swirled eye-discs, and several of them raised their metal-coated hands which were infused with various sensor elements. Outwardly human, the Liberated Elite were more cybernetic than even the Tarazedi dared, yet more human than the Cybrids would ever be even as they worked to reverse their "evolution" to become more like their creators. The particular being Maria focussed on first actually still had his eyes (shielded in half-domes of transparent plastic) was still easily recognizable as Navarre's deputy Ronald Jesses. He would shortly become more recognizable.

Working quickly, Maria sucked the five Elite through the singularity, throwing them in a tangle of limbs and prostheses into the corner of the sanctum and closing the singularity. Before they were able to untangle, Maria stood in front of them and threw a blast of gold light at them.

They began to melt under the light, their cybernetic features shimmering and slowly fading to reveal human skin suntanned by Mercury's sun. As she watched coldly they stumbled about in confusion, staring at themselves as if they didn't recall their own bodies.

When they recovered, they looked at Maria, then back at each other, and surged to motion.

They found themselves slammed into a force field. "Further attempts at violence will result in the forfeiture of the accused’s lives," she informed them.

"What is this?" Hasiq demanded, slamming his fist into the shimmering gold force field.

"Why," Maria said with mock surprise. "This is a trial. Did you never think you'd get one?"

-----

A few minutes later the prisoners had sat down with sullen acceptance of the fact they were trapped. Maria quickly brought them to date on their offenses, with scenes from the singularity she set on the wall like a big viewscreen. Hasiq looked away when the screen showed the young Delithita crumpled in the forest trying to hide under the leaves. Hernandez's lips compressed to a thin line as a young Xenogears with a knife in her hand and terror in her eyes stood him off long enough to flee to her room, there to try to cover the bruises and scrapes with ill-applied makeup. Zeni's eyes hardened as the final moments of Jehrico's sister's life played out once again. Jesses did not react to Razorback's stony look as the man handed over another sheet of schematics, but then Maria played a sequence of one of Navarre's tortures and he looked sick.

"Why are you torturing us with this?" Sels demanded, striking the stone floor with a fist. "We know what we did and we're sorry! This was eighty years ago! We've spent decades trying to forget all this!"

"My Ghosts never did," Maria said softly. "So why should you?"

The singularity rippled, and Delithita, Xenogears, Jehrico, and Icey emerged. They turned to ask Maria what was going on, and then Del, Xeno (and Razorback within her) and Jehrico froze.

Maria drew deep within herself to escape the radiant outpouring of rage that exploded from the Ghosts, a rage that could have detonated a star had it been the target of their wrath.

Icey did not recognize any of the prisoners, but Maria sent a quick burst of thought to him and he nodded in understanding.

"ENOUGH!" Maria roared, using much more than her own physical voice. The sanctum shook with the sound of it, and upstairs in Ops the seismographs would be reporting a six MMR quake. The Ghosts instantly fell into shocked silence.

"Thank you," she said quietly. The prisoners stared at her with absolute terror as she spoke her next words. "The court is now in session."

"This is a trial?" Del snarled, casting a red glow into the edges of the force field, which crackled fiercely as Maria's strength flowed into the barrier.

"Yes, it is. Each of you will get to decide the fate of the one who harmed you..."

"I've decided," came a strange, dual voice from Razorback and Xenogears. Maria glanced at them to see them morphing slowly back and forth, not remaining on either face for more than a second. It was nearly as alarming as Del's searing fury or Jehrico's cold, angry determination as he drew his pistol from his belt.

"Icey is the judge here," Maria said. "And you are the jury. The only witness is that." She gestured to the singularity. "But be aware that not only guilt and innocence is in your hands. Sentencing is too. And be aware that you are on trial right now as much as they are."

"Wait!" Del said angrily. "Where are you going?"

"Elsewhere," Maria said with a last glance back at the prisoners. "Lest I consider the pain they caused you and commit crimes against them more terrible than any they ever contemplated." With that, Maria left. The Ghosts remained standing in front of the singularity, staring at the prisoners, who stared back with understandable concern.

Icey gave a helpless shrug, and hoped he would not end up having to protect the prisoners from his fellow Ghosts...

-----

/ < / << /