Gaea

Chapter 29

The man in the black suit was rather excited, and he showed this by whispering slightly louder into his headpiece.

"I want all corporate defense forces redirected to Jupiter as soon as possible. Hijack some independent ships if need be."

The Roma Shipyard in high Earth orbit was an ugly mass of spindles and struts, stretching over several kilometers of empty space. By volume, it was the largest structure ever built in space, though it weighed no more than an ocean-bound cargo ship. It served as the construction site for some of the great Exonavis projects, including the Facem, and more recently, one of the four Equites devices. It also housed the central command for the Exonavis war machine. In many ways, it was the center of the world.

Currently, Roma's great metal cage held nothing. The Equites that had been built here was already burning for Jupiter, to help deal with whatever monstrosity had been unleashed there.

Black was not accustomed to uncertainty. For most of his impressively long life, he had known about nearly everything that happened within the human universe. He always knew exactly what he would be dealing with, and exactly how much he could afford to spend in doing so. Hell, he knew every atom of the Solar System by fucking name.

But here he was sending the whole army to intercept something completely unknown to him. The initial report woke him up about three hours previously. He was having a fine sleep, his first in over fifty hours. Then, a blinding alarm had gone off in his head and he found himself shaken awake inside the zero-g hammock. There was an unusual object, said the report, perfectly spherical and radiating in the high-radio. Then the cloud, and the vaporizing slugs. Then utter chaos as Zeus flickered off.

All EXN military assets in the Jovian moon system were immediately ordered to fire all they had at the mysterious cloud, but they suffered the same fate as the weapons platform. Black was, even now, actively trying to forget that several thousand tons of high-end explosives had been poured into this cloud with no discernible effect. Shit, he thought, they didn't even blow up. They just sort of disappeared in the haze. Lasers, at least, seemed to cause the cloud to react negatively, making it flinch and writhe before the weapon and the ship and the crew were swallowed by another arm of the cloud. Firing orders had already been updated in lieu of this new information, and all Black could do now was wait.

What was worse was that forces not under his direct control had also encountered the anomaly. Both UDS and MIAD separatist ships saw the blue glow spread across the disk of Jupiter. Some simply ran into it unknowingly, and faded with nothing but a short note of alarm. Others fired test shots at it, earning them their punctual executions. Worst of all, was the fact that Black, in his ignorance, had ordered artillery pieces on Io to fire at the cloud as well, drawing attention to the moon. A moon which was, unfortunately, populated.

The first reactions had been dumbfounded wonder. Airless Io seemed to have spontaneously grown an atmosphere, beautiful electric blue and white obscuring the imposing view of Jupiter. Pictures taken through resort windows were already on the net, all exclaiming disbelief and excitement. Then came the terrified reports of entire buildings simply disappearing in the clouds, voices shouting in brief surprise before being cut off. The stream of pictures and messages from the Ionian surface had been winding down for the past hour, and the last one, a blurry, motion-smeared image of a volcanic shield enveloped in shining blue light, had been sent out almost ten minutes ago.

Black sighed. This was going to be big. There was just no covering it up at this point. There was some hope in that the other moons of Jupiter held their fire. Maybe they wouldn't be targeted. At least Black himself had nothing to answer for. No one knew that he was the one who ordered the Io artillery to open fire. No one knew that he had killed them all.