"Any signs of sentient l life left?" Scanning the ship sir.
They wait in the half dark and the silence, staring down at the orbital research station, which is now dark and dead, floating aimlessly and lifelessly I the vacuum of space. Adam knew that there was no one left on that station, no one with an Anima anyway, but he was obligated by law and by morality to check and make sure that he was correct.
He did not bother to send his marines, he would not put them in that sort of danger.
Not after seeing what was on those cameras.
It had required a hard line from the docking station to hack into the station computers, but that was fine. As long as they didn't open the airlock doors into the other ship, they didn't have to worry, and Adam had kept a close eye on that door, just in case.
Not that he didn't trust his crew, but because it paid to be paranoid.
In fact if anyone was likely to go off their nut and open that door, it was going to be him. He sort of had a history of doing stupid things during times of danger, so he had brought Sunny in to watch him and make sure he had someone to question his actions if soemthing were to go wrong.
Luckily his reckless side had not raised its head during this time, and he had been left in peace as the ship's system's expert cracked into the station and brought up view from their cameras onto the forward windscreen.
What Adam was now seeing.... Was not encouraging.
The specimen was here, tangles and wads of thick twisted bone, slowly growing outward from the eastern wing of the ship, pressing against the walls and the floors and then curling back in on itself. Many of the cameras had been obscured by the presence of bone, but those that weren't showed a ship that had been overrun, like a weed that slowly spreads its roots through the soil, leaching life and nutrition from the other plants around it.
And it was everywhere.
It curled in great dense clots inside rooms, branched down hallways and slowly crawled through ventilation shafts.
And then there were the bodies.
At least twenty of them all together, most of them scientists of some sort, and all of them.....dead?
Generally he was pretty good at identifying a corpse, but there was something different about this. Few of the crew had to look away as he examined the monitor.
Watching as the little spurs of bone grew in and through the bodies, which were held suspended off the floor by slow impalement. The oldest body was a Tesraki of some sort, just outside the doors to the far wing where the specimen had originated .
He was held aloft a good two or three feet off the floor, his legs dangling uselessly. A bone spur about the size of Adam's arm had grown through where his eyes socket had once been, and over time other spurs of bone had slowly grown through him as well. They were small, smaller than the other branches, slipping under his skin and up, following the path of his veins through his arms and hands and into his face and neck, pushing up against the skin.
Almost as if they were.
Exploring?
He had to shake that thought off as it made him shudder in disgust.
It was the same throughout the rest of the station.
Bodies suspended in the air their arms and legs dangling lifeless even as little spurs of bone grew through them.
Now, the reason why he had questioned weather they were lifeless at all.... Was because they were still moving.
Mouths opened and shut, heads twitched, legs kicked and spines arched in uncoordinated and unnatural ways. On occasion legs moved back and forth as if they were attempting to walk.
Adam was sure that none of that was under their own power.
Something was trying to figure out how they worked.
"Sir, Lord Celex and his ship have arrived."
Adam turned in his seat, "Make contact and send him the footage."
They did as told and an image of the angry little creature appeared on screen just to his left. He was looking at something off of camera and Adam didn't both him for the time being. He was now pretty good at reading the expressions of Celex, though it was particularly helpful that the little creature had picked up the occasional human mannerism.
He frowned pulling his ears flat to his head, "Just like the palace." He muttered
Adam turned to the side to look out the viewing screen, to where he could just see Lord Celex's ship floating not so distantly.
If there was one ship in the universe that could rival the majesty and power of the omen, it was the emperor's ship.
Certainly it was more pleasing than his own ship, with sharp sweeping lines and organic shapes. The thing might as well have been a floating castle, reminding Adam that, in space aerodynamics did not matter, and you can build and fly whatever the hell you want.
The emperor might as well have been piloting a crystal palace.
It was actually probably more impressive than the omen, but Adam wasn't yet ready to admit that.
Not to mention, it was rumored that this was the ship that lord Celex had used to destroy an entire planet and everyone on it.
That rumor was, of course, unconfirmed.
"There are no signs of..... life on this ship." His hesitation made Adam sure that he was having similar thoughts.
"What do you suggest."
"Destroy it of course. Whatever that thing is doing.... I have a feeling ti is trying to learn more about the constructs with which it is playing, and if that is the case, than I don't want it getting bigger and more powerful , or honor forbid, communicating with others of it's kind."
That was a good point.
"Do you suggest using...." Adam paused trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. This was no time to feel excited about blowing something up, but there was still a small part of him that couldn't help it.
"I would trust nothing else to destroy it completely."
Adam nodded stiffly to hide his absolute glee as he turned to Sunny, "Ready the void cannon."
Did he pee himself a little saying that?
...
...
Maybe
To be fair, Sunny seemed almost as excited as he was as she called down the culex to ready the weapon.
The void cannon had been a gift from Lord Celex during the Omen's construction, and had been installed by his own team of workers once Adam had agreed that he would employ a team of Celex to work it.
He wasn't entirely sure how the cannot was supposed to work, and he was pretty sure that the emperor wanted to keep it that way.
Overhead alarms began to blare all across the ship, and he felt the vibration in the floor as the massive gun was slotted into place with a deep booming noise that echoed throughout the ship.
"Void cannon deployed, preparing to fire."
Adam slipped into the command chair, forced to unlock a series of codes before he could even trigger the gun.
Targeting the ship, he flipped off the last safety measure.
"Void cannon firing."
Adam pressed the trigger, and the entire ship rocked backwards. The fusion engine flared once at max output to keep them from flying back.
Everyone rocked in their seats as a small white shape shot towards the other ship.
At first there was nothing, and then there was a burst of light which resolved itself quickly into a whirling vortex of pure blackness within a halo.
The micro black hole lived for only a second before collapsing and exploding outward like a mini supernova. The blinding flash of light overloaded the front cameras and sensors, and caused their front windscreen to go dark to protect their eyes from the massive flash of light.
When the front windscreen resolved itself, they looked out upon nothing but empty space.
There was nothing left.
Adam only just managed to not wiggle with delight, straightening himself and keeping his face impassive. Sunny gave him a look that amounted to: you and I will geek out later.
He tried to hid the grin in a stiff cough against his elbow.
"Holy shit." Someone said quietly, "Remind me never to piss off the Celzex
Adam had to agree.
And he would have to thank the emperor later for his generous donation to the cause. The void cannon was probably one of the most impressive weapons he had ever seen. He didn't know how it worked, all that he knew was that it caused the creation of a micro singularity which lasted long enough to pull the target apart into its component atomic pieces before imploding. Nothing would have survived on that ship bigger than a neutron.
"What do we know?" he asked, turning to look at Simon, who he had tasked with finding out more information on this particular installation.
As usual, she was ready and prepared for his question, sitting up in her seat and adjusting her glasses as she looked down at her screen. Even from here he could see that she had a set of neatly compiled notes sitting on the screen in neat orderly columns stacked by size.
The inner workings of Simon's brain would probably always be a mystery to him, but he hardly minded when she was as effective as she was.
"It was classified, sir."
"how classified?"
"Top secret, sir. Sensitive compartmented."
He sighed, "I don't suppose you were able to get in/"
Simon gave him a scathing look from behind her glasses, "No, and I certainly wouldn't have tried. I don't a top secret clearance like you do."
He huffed, he would have to go through legal channels to figure out what this was all about, and might even have to put a request through to-
"Sir, The GA chairwoman is on the line as is the UN president."
"Put them through."
Not like they were the kind of people he could just deny.
Their images appeared on screen a moment later. The former VP of the UN looked tired and run down, greyer than he had been before. It seemed as if, though the VP position had been good for him, he was not enjoying the presidency.
He had made it very clear that he was not running in the next election, leaving Admiral Kelly and her opponents for that.
"Chancelor, Mr. president." He said bowing slightly to the chairwoman and saluting the President.
"Admiral." The man said with a sigh, "We saw activity regarding the research station."
Adam nodded, "You saw my lieutenant sniffing around the top secret restricted clearance?"
"We did."
"Well unfortunately for that clearance, I have already seen what was on that station. I know that this has soemthing to do with..... something to do with the Eden project in one way or another, or the specimen, what I don't know is how a hole shit ton of it ended up on a research station, killing all of the scientists there before I had to atomize it."
The two of them looked very tired.
All three of them had been dealing with a lot recently, and it was getting no better. Trying to figure out how much to tell the public, arguing with delegates, determining how to keep all of this quiet for the safety and sanity of the public.
The list could have gone on for ages.
The Chairwoman took the lead, "After your first encounter with the object, we sent a team down after you to collect evidence from the rubble of the city."
Adam frowned and crossed his arms, "You failed to inform me of this."
The chairwoman lifted her head in mild defiance, "That did not seem relevant to you at the time considering that I believe you were preparing to be a witness in a trial, were you not." Adam went quiet and allowed her to continue, "Our teams were able to recover a piece of the specimen and sent it to be examined by our scientists on board this particular station. The first doctor who worked on the project quit shortly after markings appeared scratched on the inside of the protective case. Those notes were later detailed to be a blueprint for a biomechanical structure designed to house a power source."
"A construct." Adam muttered under his breath.
The chairwoman sighed, "Yes, a construct. A human construct. Based from what we can tell of these markings, the blueprint is rudimentary, and appears to have been created by way of reverse engineering as it isn't nearly as comprehensive as the ones found in the Eden project. We believe that whoever made that blueprint had not seen the originals, but were trying to recreate by working backwards. As far as we know the human construct was the only blueprint that ever appeared. Though we cannot be sure as the doctor quit shortly after and we had to find a replacement. By that time the specimen was beginning to spread and broke from it's containment. We sealed off that end of the laboratory and found a new hire."
Adam sat back in his chair listening.
Growing uneasy with every word.
"The new doctor was able to decipher more of what the blueprints said, and we only sent him in because the specimen had shown no signs of hostility in the past. As I seem to recall, you even interacted with it, and it gave you..... visions."
Adam shifted nervously.
"Either way we had no idea this would be the outcome."
"I would appreciate if you sent all those documents to my chief medical officer. He will want to look those over to see if the can augment his notes."
"Of course, anything to Help Dr. krill."
He nodded once and spoke with them for a few more minutes before closing out turning just in time to meet Krill as he scuttled into the room. The little doctor looked more frazzled than usual, which was saying something, and in his arms, he held a stack of papers. He did not look at the papers as he ran up to Adam.
"I think we missed something."
Adam frowned, "Missed soemthing?"
"Yes, missed soemthing."
Adam scratched at his head, "What do you mean."
"I mean this, look, there is Polaris in the middle, There is Earth, this is Anin, this is the Celex home world.
He shrugged "yes, the Polaris Axis, I know."
Krill waved a hand to shut him up, "Yes yes, I know you know, but did you think it was odd that there were only three locations in the Polaris axis. So far there are three locations in three ninety-degree directions from each other, but based on how three dimensions work, there are at least SIX directions. So I Looked at the star chart, and the opposite direction from the celex homeworld is."
He turned the diagram to face Adam.
And Adam felt his stomach drop into his toes.
He almost choked.
Krill nodded.
"The Cobalt Cluster!....."
The Place where he had met Conn. Home of the starborn.