(Ed note: Apologies for the spotty uploads lately. I’ve been apartment hunting in 80%+ humidity and by the time I get home, I’m fair well shattered and unable to really do much of anything.)The silence within a nursery was broken by the sound of an infant’s wail. It was allowed to continue crying in the brightly painted nursery for a few minutes, then a merely “pretty” middle-aged woman walked into the room and moved to the side of the crib.(Ed note: For those curious as to why the baby was left crying for a few minutes, it’s an early childhood development strategy. By picking up an infant as soon as it starts crying, you teach it that crying equals attention. In a nutshell, never pick up a crying baby unless it’s sick or injured. Let it cry for a few minutes, then distract it until it stops crying before finally picking it up.)She leaned over the crib and teased the infant with a canary-yellow plush toy until it stopped wailing with a hiccup and focused on the toy, reaching out fo
“How long...” Fleet Admiral Jason Ryfczinski said. “How long ago did this happen?”{Initial scans indicate a range of 30 to 75 years ago, Admiral. More detailed scans will narrow the field,} Teegarden, the task force’s AI, replied.“So there’s a chance of survivors. Signal the fleet: launch a satellite constellation and put the explorer team on short call. Their orders are to find the survivors of this... this unholy massacre, should any exist. If there are no survivors, I want bodies,” the fleet admiral ordered.“Yes, Sir,” the flag comms officer replied, then turned back to his display to distribute the orders to the fleet. “Satellites deployed, Admiral, they’ll be on station in approximately five hours.”“Split the fleet, send half of it to Teegarden c. The other half, including the Teegarden herself, is to approach Teegarden b and enter a high equatorial orbit.”“Aye aye, Admiral,” the flag tactical officer replied. “ETA to high equatorial orbit around Teegarden b is eleven hours.
The messenger was swiftly ordered to proceed directly to Earth, escorted by the picket detachment nearest to her. After signaling an acknowledgement of the order, the small vessel’s VI fell into formation between the two corvettes and behind the destroyer. Once everything was in place, they lit off their gravity drives and began maneuvering through the Oort cloud and the Sol system’s heliopause beyond it. As it passed through the system, the VI communicated with CENTCOM and received the updated map and access to the system plot, allowing it to see all of the public ships in the system. Almost all of the industry and shipping was distributed along the system ecliptic. Humanity still thought of things along 2d planes, it seemed. But it was unimaginably difficult to overcome hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of evolution telling the species that ground was ground and sky was sky. Learning that “down” was more loose as a concept than they had imagined would naturally take s
“Since the foundation of the empire, We have taken pride in our track record of promises made, promises kept. And today, We are here to deliver on one another of those promises: Our thousandth fortress city.” Aron stood at a podium addressing the public in one of the new fortress city’s government squares, a space about as big as an American football stadium. The entire area was filled to the brim with citizens who had nothing but smiles on their faces as they listened to his address.The people watching Aron’s address live would be among the first to finally receive keys to their new living spaces in the fortress city Aron was currently using as a venue for his speech. They had been anticipating the day they would finally become property owners in the empire ever since their interior designs had been approved.Over the past six months, fortress city after fortress city had been coming online and filling with residents in an orderly fashion. There was something to be said for the orga
A few hundred meters away from Aron, a rolling black thundercloud was scudding across the sky in his direction. He lifted his right leg and, when he set it down, he had moved ten meters away from the children, placing himself between the cloud and them. Behind him, the two emperor’s aegis members of his close guard activated the area protection feature of their PAPS, surrounding the children—and themselves—in a dome of solidified mana that glowed a faint blue.Aron faced the incoming cloud, an unnaturally grave expression on his face as he raised his hand and a shield rune popped into being between him and the cloud. Milliseconds later, a lightning bolt impacted the shield and the crackling boom of thunder almost instantly followed.“Interesting, interesting,” a voice filled with confidence drifted out of the dust kicked up by the lightning strike. “You reacted to my approach before anyone else... even before your security team. Interesting indeed!”As the dust settled, a muscular man
A few months after the Three Percenters had graduated from the awakeners’ school and hero academies, reality had finally sunk in for them. The power they held in their hands made them walking weapons, and they could massacre entire towns of normal people, should they wish to do so. And human nature being what it is, most of them began feeling at least a little bit superior to “normies”.If their superiority complexes had stopped there, it wouldn’t be a big issue. A little arrogance was fine, and could even be a good thing if it was properly restrained and channeled. After all, even Aron had to admit that he was more of a benevolent dictator that had been moving farther and farther away from human norms since he’d received the system. But with the age range of the first human awakeners being what it was, a good bit of them had taken their superiority complex way beyond what could be even remotely considered healthy.Basically, hormonal teenagers are hard enough to deal with (just ask a
Lightning, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t move at the speed of light. The invisible “leader strike” travels from the cloud to the ground at around two hundred thousand miles per hour; a far cry from the speed of light, which travels at upwards of 670 MILLION miles per hour. But what people think of when they look at lightning isn’t the invisible leader strike, but what’s called the “return stroke”, which heats the air in the ionized pathways left behind by the leader strike, turning it to plasma. That travels significantly faster, at around a third of light speed or 60,000 miles per second.So when the people surrounding Aron and the awakener supremacist, Alejandro Garcia finally blinked their eyes clear of the temporary blindness caused by seeing a return stroke at incredibly close range, all they saw was the emperor of mankind standing in the same position he had been, slightly leaning forward with his hands clasped behind his back and his chin jutting out. But behind him was a
As Aron approached his personal shuttle, the aegis members surrounding the park rose to their feet and deactivated the PAPS dome, then collapsed into two files behind him and followed him into the aircraft. Once everyone had boarded, the hatch hissed shut and the shuttle lifted off on a suborbital hop to the Cube at Avalon Island. It was still the center of the imperial government, as Aron had decreed that his imperial palace would be the very last building to be constructed, and the construction would only begin after everyone else had been settled into their new homes.{Sir, we have a dispatch from Proxima Centauri coded for your eyes only,} Nova reported the moment Aron settled into his seat.“I wonder what happened that warranted sending a dispatch,” he said. There were very few things that would merit the sending of dispatches across the vast gulf between Earth and the exploration fleets, so the news was either very good, very bad, or had far-reaching implications that might affe