Arrival

The door closes with a faint hiss of an airtight seal forming as the elevator cab begins to accelerate up the shaft.

Special Agent Catallia pauses a moment to inspect her surroundings. The elevator pod is large enough to comfortably hold a dozen or so people, personal space included, but she is currently the only person inside the pod. It is a cylinder of glass and metal caged by four electric rails that propel the elevator. It is nestled in a trench-like elevator shaft embedded into the side of what at first glance appears to be the curved wall of a very large structure. Four metal rods in the shaft interface with the electric rails and allow the pod to move up and down. The floor is made of shiny steel that obscures the machinery presumably powering the pod, but the walls, ceiling and door are formed from unblemished glass that provides a clear view of the outside. The air at this altitude is thin, a bit too thin for unaugmented bodies and far too thin for sustained combat.

The Special Agent, meanwhile, is not as presentable as the space she is in. Patterns of artificial blood, the remains of fanatical Black League and Red Vanguards soldiers, stain the pale-white carapace-like ceramic armor enclosing most of her body, the smooth tinted glass mask wholly obscuring her face, the large power pack weighing on her back, and the several weapons on her person. The skeletonized sword in her left hand and the blade-claws extending out of her gauntlets are similarly caked with blood, brains, and entrails. With a mental command the energy fields in the blades vaporize the filth into a fine cloud. With another mental command the blade-claws retract away, and the Special Agent returns the sword to the holster on her right hip.

If they so desperately want to get into melee range, then I suppose I will oblige and gut them.

The Special Agent reaches around her back with her left hand, grasping for a cloth to clean her face shield with, but is interrupted by faint but growing tremors rocking the elevator cab. She grabs onto the railing on the inside of the cab and tries to identify the cause of the tremors.

Not this again.

The base of the elevator shaft, terminating at the surface the wall rests on, explodes into rubble as a large object collides into it. Through a rain of broken glass and smashed concrete the object - a bipedal humanoid war engine the height of a tall apartment building, bearing a miniature battleship superstructure on its shoulders - has run head-first into the shaft. It did so a few seconds too late to catch the pod that is now out of reach and getting farther away with every second. The engine reaches up with a pair of oversized metal gauntlet hands, animalistically hammering and clawing at the elevator shaft, in a futile attempt to crush its target. It sounds its foghorn as if howling in anger; the low tone of the horn subtly vibrates the pod.

The interloper - the Storm Herald, the most powerful Reduction Engine in existence and the only one of its kind - shrinks in her field of view as the elevator pod continues up the shaft. The Special Agent has the displeasure of having faced it down several times in the past. Wherever its despicable master, the cause of the all-consuming war that led her here, is at, the cathedral on legs is as well. It seems to have developed a special hatred of her, just as its master did, judging by its relentless pursuit of her up to this point. She privately wonders if its master’s madness has gotten to it too.

The nest of five-inch secondary turrets bristling from the engine’s superstructure turn to face the elevator pod, ready to deliver a barrage of explosive shells, but the semi-intelligent machine shifts its attention away from the lone figure in the glass pod as explosions blossom across its back. It turns around to face this new threat, sounds its warhorn in challenge of the attacker, and fires off a rain of tracered shells. Streaks of light dart forth from the Storm Herald.

The Special Agent recovers from the shock of almost being crushed into a pulp. She stands up, grabs the cloth from one of several pouches on her waist, wipes away the splats of gore on her glass face mask and armor, returns the cloth to its pouch, and looks out once more.

The large curved wall the elevator is on is but the topmost portion of an engineering marvel easily the size of a large metropolis. The curved wall from this height can easily be identified as a cylinder of concrete and metal, growing wider at descending intervals like a multi-layered rod in a cut-away diagram with some of the outer layers peeled away. Giant structural support struts that would be more appropriate for orbit-bound space stations extend downwards and outwards from the cylinder at several areas, each extending down to the surface of this planet and meeting it at an artificial and unnatural angle. Of the six struts that stabilize the central cylinder, only two are visible; the other four are blocked by the curvature of the cylinder the Special Agent is ascending up.

The World Engine - a city-scale torch drive, designed by ambitious engineers, ordered by a former leader turned madman, built by the unchecked industry of star-spanning nations, and intended to propel this planet through the abyss of space with no regard for physics - sticks out of the surface of this planet like a Brutalist termite mound. It is inactive, silent and dead to the world. There is no sign of the apocalypse inducing reaction it is designed to ignite and sustain.

Surrounding the struts on the surface are rail lines, highways, smokestacks and refineries, open elevator platforms and tunnels leading underground, landing pads, missile silos, airfields, and all the other details of a mega-factory, spaceport, and military base crossed together. This industrial cityscape stretches on to the horizon in all directions, and it is ablaze. Columns of smoke and bright flashes of weapons fire form an arc of destruction around the portion of the planet surface visible from this perspective. The silhouettes of lesser Reduction Engines stride between factories and high-rises, through the streets and railroads below, as they march out to their final battle and inevitable doom.

Stealth fighters and surface to air missiles play a game of whack-a-mole with each other, while dark swarms of bombers rain tiny dots down onto the landscape below. Raging firestorms spread outwards from where the tiny dots land and turn vital traffic junctions into impassable no man’s land. The five-inch shells from the Reduction Engine below burst into black clouds of shrapnel in the sky, but the source of the explosions is long gone.

The Special Agent looks down at the end of a war to end all wars, the death throes of the Axis and its mythos of a million-year empire, and the ultimate triumph of democracy over tyranny. Here she stands, on an elevator headed up to the top of a marvel of engineering, with orders to capture alive - or destroy, if that is not possible - the Paramount Leader of the Axis.

She thinks back to the moment that set this all into motion, that early afternoon many years ago when she hurled the satchel at the retired politician exiting his front door to see who called for him. She was a hot-headed revolutionary with burning dreams of curing the evils of society one bomb at a time. He was the former Speaker of the Council with faded memories of triumphing against the Great Filters and ensuring the perpetuity of mankind. She watched the fires from the explosion devour and incinerate him and walked away, assuming he could not survive the inferno.

She did not expect him to survive and return a few years later; to roil up the people’s fear and despair into a boiling pot of hatred; to coup and purge the Collective Security Union he toiled for much of his life to perfect; to turn it into the Axis and compel it into the bitterest persecution the history books has ever seen - and, if all goes well, will ever see.

She understands well that, had she not thrown that satchel, the retired old man would likely never have gone mad and brought half of known reality with him.

Time to clean up what I started.

The Special Agent dispels these memories for now. There is work to be done.

As the elevator pod continues its rapid journey upwards, she looks out the elevator and upwards.

The sunless and pitch-black sky, too thin to reflect enough light to take on a color, is broken up by small white orbs. Lines and streaks of light jump between the different white orbs, and every so often an orb turns into an expanding cloud of pinpricks of light in silent explosions bright enough to camera flash the landscape below. Of the many ships, Accord Home Navy and Axis Armada alike, locked in deadly struggle far above, most of them are only visible as bright dots too small to distinguish. However, as the Special Agent looks up through the transparent ceiling, the select identifiable participants of the ongoing space battle come into view.

At the heart of the brawl occurring far above, dwarfing all other combatants by almost an order of magnitude, is an ovoid ark-ship made of a patchwork of a hundred different ship design styles. Bright running lights along its hull reveal its skeletal structure, with half a dozen minimalist “ribs” surrounding an inner triple helix of wildly different modules jammed together in an almost haphazard way. Nestled at its rear is a cylindrical propulsion section capped by nine engines each the size of a Terminus dreadnought, while at the front is another mass of superstructure and greebles that, if detached and allowed to float freely, would easily pass as a space station.

Inscribed upon one of its ribs is the ark’s name - Solidarity - in large (relative to the rib) stenciled letters. It occupies a large portion of the sky directly overhead by virtue of its prodigious size and relative proximity to the planet surface, its shape and size in the sky evoking imagery of a zeppelin hovering above a skyscraper. Shimmering partition-like shields surrounding the ark-ship shield its interior against the onslaught of desperate fire headed its way.

Surrounding the Solidarity is an onslaught of doomed ships and dead men. What appears to be a significant portion of what’s left of the Axis Armada is piling into a suicidally close-ranged melee against the ark-ship. The Hammer of Olympia, one of the last two remaining Terminus dreadnoughts of the Axis Armada, fires a broadside of Casaba-Howitzer nuclear shaped charges into the port side of the ark-ship at almost spitting range. The plasma beams splatter against the partition shields and bounce away into an expanding shower of bright sparks. The ark-ship retaliates with its own salvo of ultra-relativistic electron beams that deflagrate the dreadnought’s shields into a series of powerful X-ray flares.

The Empire’s Shadow, the other Terminus dreadnought approaching from the starboard side, fires its spinally mounted Blazar Lance into the heart of the ark-ship. The sky flashes a blinding blue-white for a moment, forcing the Special Agent to look away even with heavily tinted visors. The superweapon, capable of crippling attack moons with a single shot, only manages to bring down the shields on the Solidarity for a moment. It immediately comes under attack from a lightshow of particle beams slicing and tearing up and down its hull, ablating away its main armor belt and cutting through less protected superstructure.

The burning fragments of a conveyor ship, smashed out of the way by the ark-ship and cut in half by one of its maneuvering torch drives, falls out of the sky. The Special Agent watches as one fragment - stenciled with the text Chariot of Angels and a large symbol of a red right-handed metal gauntlet grasping a gray orb - falls past the elevator. The fragment slams into the flat area at the bottom of the elevator shaft, wholly tearing the entire area off of the World Engine with the force of the impact, and continues tumbling down the sides of the World Engine in an avalanche of broken concrete. The tremors shake the elevator pod once again, but this time she is ready and holds on solidly to a railing. She did not see if the Storm Herald was caught in the impact zone, but she hopes it was.

The escape route down is gone. The only way is up and through the Paramount Leader.

The tremors do not end. Instead, despite the fragment falling farther away, the tremors turn into a seismic event that seemingly rattles the entire World Engine.

What is it now?

The Solidarity, in its haste to smash the Axis Armada, has maneuvered itself into a position with its propulsion module located directly over the heart of the World Engine. The ark, unfazed by the last charge of the Axis against it, believed itself to be utterly indestructible. Nothing - not nuclear shaped charges, not X-ray beams, not the Blazar Lance - will break its guard. No force will ever truly harm this technological marvel. It is righteous, and heroes never die.

The World Engine, awakening from its slumber, enacts ignition.

For a moment, the Special Agent felt only pain.

The torch drive mechanism buried deep in the bowels of the World Engine kickstarts an astronomically powerful reaction fueled by the might of Atom. Exhaust material, accelerated to a fraction of lightspeed by atoms smashing together and breaking apart, accelerates up the central cavity of the Engine and into the cosmos above. The relativistic exhaust beam immediately causes a booming thunderclap as its extreme heat and velocity forces the surrounding air to violently explode away. The entire World Engine trembles as the thrust force of the torch drive mechanism pushes it into the planet’s crust, causing localized earthquakes and collapsing weakened underground spaces.

The blue-white beam spears into the Solidarity.

For a moment it seems that the ark-ship might be able to resist the exhaust beam with its handwavium shields. Then Newton’s laws of motion triumph over Clarketech, the shields collapse, the exhaust beam pierces through the engine compartment and into the heavens beyond, and the compartment detonates. The rear of the ark-ship violently tears itself apart and sets off a chain of nuclear explosions ripping through the triple helix core of the Solidarity.

The old man commanding the technological marvel of the Jailors has only enough time to wonder if his friends on the planet down below will survive his folly before atomic fire incinerates him into ashes and dust.

In contrast to the rolling thunder of the World Engine vomiting out its atomic might, the death of the ark-ship occurs in deathly silence. There is no atmosphere at that altitude, no medium to announce the murder of the prized crown jewel, no substrate to carry on the regret of the wizened old man at the helm of the ark-ship.

Heroes do die, after all.

The Special Agent is partially crouched over inside the elevator pod, one arm held over her glass-shielded face. The sensory overload of this many things exploding is too much for her to handle all at once.

The sensation of deceleration and a quiet ding shakes her out of her stunned state. She lowers her left arm and looks around. The elevator has arrived at its destination.

She turns to face the elevator door that will bring her to the Solarium, to the large legislative chamber torn out of its original space station housing and unceremoniously relocated to the top of the World Engine, to the place where the cause of the war to end all wars stand, to the place where the war will end.

She checks her equipment once again. Tempest blade, ready. Lightning claws, ready. Everything else is in place. She pulls out a glass pane from another pouch and holds it in front of her, inspecting herself in the reflection. The angelic halo mounted behind her head, the source of a life-saving shield, glows a pale lunar white. The glass face mask turns transparent for a moment, revealing tired eyes and lips pressed together into a thin line, before restoring its tint. The glass pane returns to its pouch as the Special Agent looks up-

She is once again surprised as something large slams into the elevator’s transparent glass doors with enough force to turn them opaque with a sea of spiderweb cracks. Seeing no other option, the Special Agent draws the sword from the holster on her right hip and, with several well-placed swings, cuts through the door at its edges. The door splinters into a small puddle of granular chunks, revealing the source of the impact: a person in body armor similar to hers. The face mask of this person is completely broken, with only a few glass shards stuck to the rim, and the sounds of pressurized air leaking out their suit and into the thin atmosphere emanates from the limp body.

The Special Agent recognizes the calico hair and once confident face of the leader of the Company who now lies in near-death at her feet. The hilt and broken blade of a sword of Oriental design lay in the glass near its former wielder.

The Company leader has just enough life left to realize the lethal consequences of her rash actions before septic shock from her wounds shuts off all of her organs.

For a moment, the Special Agent is dumbfounded at the sight before her. How did they get here?

Then she realizes.

The Special Agent is stunned.

''That’s it? You abandoned us for this? You stupid idiot, what were you thinking?''

The Five from the Company were supposed to accompany the Special Agent and the rest of the strike team through the World Engine. Together they were supposed to execute a series of secondary tasks and destroy the last of the Paramount Leader’s assets before confronting him at the Solarium together.

Part way through the ascent up the World Engine they suddenly disappeared without explanation or notification, setting off the attention of the Engine’s defenders on their unknown path and drawing them to the strike team. From a platoon of hand-chosen paratroopers, the strike team has been whittled down to just the Special Agent.

Judging by the scene in front of her, the Five went straight for the kill and failed miserably.

Before the Special Agent lies the large open space of the Solarium. A transparent dome held up by large opaque arches forms the firmament over a floor of a glass-like carbon material. The floor, at least a whole football field long in diameter, is strewn with expended casings, empty magazines, and empty ammo belts; splatters of red and yellow blood; bullet holes, craters, and scorch marks; the bodies of dead Umbral Order stormtroopers; and the remaining four of the Company Five.

A raven-haired member of the Company Five lay in a pool of blood at one end of the Solarium, a dropped belt-fed grenade launcher beside her, a sea of brass casing around her, and a mass of perforated stormtroopers scattered in a rough arc in front of her. The Company gunner has only enough life left to regret single-mindedly chasing glory to its conclusion before she exsanguinates from numerous gyro-gun wounds.

A tabby-haired member of the Company Five lay in a broken mass a short distance from the gunner, her chest armor broken into fragments and the contents of a medical kit strewn about her. The Company medic has only enough life left to regret not objecting to the decision to disobey superior orders and rush the Paramount Leader before her lungs fill with the result of several shattered ribs and she drowns in her own blood.

A silver-haired member of the Company Five keels over at the other end of the Solarium, engulfed in white phosphorus flame, a fallen precision rifle beside her and the exploded body of a stormtrooper with peeled open chemical tanks on their back a short distance away. The Company sniper has only enough life left to reminisce of all the things she wanted to say to the old man on the ark-ship before her nerve endings all burn away.

A crimson-haired member of the Company Five desperately struggles to get up and fight, her legs and half of her torso only slightly twitching due to a severed spinal cord, a dropped esoteric weapon just out of reach. The Company specialist has only enough time left to feel one last burst of blind rage towards her assailant before the right wing of an angular Aquila drives right through her glass face shield and splits her skull open.

Standing above the now limp body of the last of the Five to perish is the Paramount Leader - or something that resembles him.

The figure partially hunched over at the center of the Solarium is encased head to toe in a dark suit of composite material that draws artistic design from both medieval plate armor and the Special Agent’s body armor. An angelic halo glowing a bright solar yellow rests behind his head, an enclosed helmet with a tinted visor that looks out at the world in a scowl of contempt and scorn. A pair of metal gauntlets, crackling with power, encloses his hands. Grasped in both armored hands is a staff-like weapon, bearing an angular Aquila and right-handed gauntlet as a mace head, no longer than an average baton. A dark cape drapes over his back, revealing the outline of some sort of backpack shaped device underneath it. The dead body of the crimson-haired Company specialist lap limp before him. He stares out at the corpse before him, any emotions or feelings hidden behind his impassive helmet.

The once commanding visage of the tyrant at the center of the Solarium is marred by wounds of war. Hairline fractures crisscross his helmet visor. Dents and bullet holes pepper the entirety of his armor, especially the well-armored chestplate, and a series of long and shallow blade marks - arranged as if created by a set of sharp claw-blades - crisscross his forearms and helmet. The cape on his back is perforated, burnt, and shot through in many places. Yellow and red blood splatters - from the mass of dead stormtroopers and the Company Five - cover his armor and cape in numerous places. Where normally he holds the look of absolute and unquestioned authority, here he more closely resembles a raving madman fresh off a killing spree.

The Special Agent draws her sword and grips it tightly. Not only did the Five fail in their surprise attack, they also succeeded in stripping away what little sanity the former Speaker of the Council had. The last vestiges of things going as expected are now gone, reduced to atoms.

The Paramount Leader slowly stands up from his hunched stance and turns his head in the direction of the elevator. Upon forming the closest thing to an eye contact with the Special Agent, he jolts, as if suddenly surprised. He futilely wipes his staff on his cape for a few moments, achieving little in the process, before eventually giving up.

She expected a mustache-twirling villain probing her with veiled accusations, a spiteful tyrant blaming her for all of the world’s woes, a broken and hopeless man accepting his sentence, or - given what she just saw - a butcher of worlds preparing to claim another skull.

She did not expect what came next.

"Welcome home, Radeleine.."

Unlike his usual booming baritone voice demanding submission and compliance, here he is soft-spoken, cautious and uncertain, almost as if he does not know who he is or what he is supposed to do.

“I am so sorry for the mess I made. These stray cats - vermin - got in while I was away preparing for your return. I had no other choice - they forced my hands - but to have them euthanized.”