ic Incursion: Three If By Space

[Avenger Assembled]

November 10, 2014

A hyperlight signal crossed the vast interstellar network, ricocheting off Lor communications stations a moment before the stations were deluged by word of the apocalypse that had befallen the homeworld. Further and further out into the Orion Arm it went, passing by the populated worlds of the galaxy as it headed into a remote galactic backwater that held one insignificant yellow dwarf and a small system of eight planets. It hit the unmanned station the Lor had left in Pluto orbit decades earlier and headed in one last burst for Earth, passing by the Lighthouse and heading straight for its source - Archetech.

In a darkened laboratory, Sharl Tulink arrived on his hands and knees, screaming. "NO!" Instinctively, he reached out mentally into the surrounding network, both the building's power grid and the computers all around him. The lights flared up at his command and the computers came to life, the primitive technology and raw naturalism of Terra a sharp contrast to the sterile, doomed world he'd left behind him. As the Terran computers booted up, Sharl fought the natural urge to dive directly into their systems and not stop running through that primitive wireless network until he reached the familiar confines of Tronik - but of course that wouldn't really solve anything, would it?

Instead, he raised his head and got up off the floor - though of course being a holographic projection he'd only barely been on it in the first place. He reached out into the surrounding network of the city and called a familiar number.

"Gina!" he called, remembering old distress signals easily enough. "Code 404!"

[Electra]

Not too far away. in an unassuming little house with way too much basement for its floorplan, Gina Evans was sleeping the sleep of the fairly righteous. She and Steve slept back-to-back in their ultra-king size bed, as much cuddling as either of them would allow while unconscious. She'd had a long day at work, public relations in the morning, overseeing human tests on the newest line of cybernetic replacement limbs in the afternoon and evening, followed by a late-night conference call to a robotics manufacturer in Tokyo. It had only been an hour ago that she'd fallen into bed, dreaming happy dreams of flexing her authority and giving herself a day off tomorrow. 

 

The shrilling of Gina's phone startled them both awake, though thankfully time and therapy had tempered Steve's instincts to come up swinging. Gina would've thrown the phone and gone back to sleep, except that she recognized the especially jarring ringtone as one of her emergency codes. Sharl's emergency code, in fact. "What the hell?" she muttered, groping her way to the edge of the bed. "He's like a billion light years away. What kind of cell phone coverage could he get?" 

 

She picked up the phone, noted the glowing "404" flashing on the screen, Sharl's general purpose distress code. It had seemed funny at the time. "What is it?" she demanded as she answered. "Did you do something to piss off the Lor?"

[Avenger Assembled]

Steve kept his own counsel as Gina talked on the phone, his face hidden by the near-darkness of the room. 

 

"What?! No! I-" Images swarmed behind Sharl's eyes for a moment, the names and faces of people who were surely dead by now. "Something bad happened! To me, to the Science Ministry, to the whole planet! Lor-Van...I think it's gone!" Knowing that Gina was probably in bed with her boyfriend was all that kept him from jumping right through the cell system and out to her side. "It was Star-Khan, but he was some kind of cyborg monster, and there was this fleet of ships!" She could hear him breathing over the phone, a half-sob in his voice. "You've got to come over here, right away!" 

[Electra]

"What?" Gina scrubbed her face with her free hand, tried to focus. Her eidetic memory let her rewind Sharl's babble and play it over again in her head, but it didn't make much more sense the second time. "All right, try to calm down," she told him, flipping on the bedside lamp and groping for her slippers. "Go up to my office on Eleven, I'll meet you there in two minutes." 

 

She closed the phone and turned to look at Steve. "I have no idea what's going on," she told him, "but it could be big. You may want to stay awake for awhile. I'll be in the basement." Tossing on her favorite shapeless brown bathrobe, Gina headed for the kitchen, a can of Mountain Dew, and hopefully a little mental clarity. 

 

Two minutes later, in the spacious walk-in closet of the eleventh floor penthouse office at ArcheTech, Miss Americana's perfect blue eyes opened wide. She looked around, opened the door, and stepped out into her office, dressed for a new day and ready to lead. "Sharl?" she called. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl was already there, his sunglasses off and his eyes wide. At the sight of Miss Americana, the traumatized program jumped to his feet and hugged her like the big sister she'd always been - his magnetically-charged field humming across Gina's mental connection. "It was just so, so fast! I didn't...I didn't think I was going to make it back, by the end," he admitted. "But Rex, the head Lor scientist in the Vox, he stayed at his post and he transmitted me back even though he knew he was going to die." He scrubbed his eyes. "The last thing I saw was the people who couldn't make it to the ships in time, looking at me, and wanting me to save them, but I couldn't! I couldn't even touch them!" 

[Electra]

"Okay," Miss A murmured, hugging Sharl back as she checked him over for injuries. He'd obviously been in a fight, there was damage all over his body, but nothing that seemed immediately dangerous. His mental state was far more fragile. "Okay, Sharl, it's going to be all right. You're safe here," she reminded him. She maneuvered him over to one of the plush visitor chairs and sat him down, then went over to the wall computer screen. As she spoke, she opened his program in the ArcheTech mainframe and began repairing the bits of damaged code. "Take a couple of deep breaths, and then tell me everything. Start at the beginning," she encouraged. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl fell silent, and as his wounds healed Gina could see his mind working - literally and figuratively. "It had started before I got there," he finally said. "I remember people talking about rumors from the edges of Lor space. Refugees on the move, fleeing something. But I wasn't really paying attention," he confessed. "I was so focused on the presentation, and everything they were showing me..." He shook his head. "And then, uh, they interrupted my presentation, my escorts did, because an unknown fleet had entered the Lor system. Somehow they just made it past the outer defenses without triggering anything." As he spoke, it was a simple enough matter for Miss Americana to pull up the information stored in his active memory. Visual and auditory records of everything. 

 

"They started evacuating right away - sending everyone to the orbital cities. It's to minimize, uh, civilian casualties..." He looked away for a moment, images of a wild aerial melee playing as Miss Americana watched. "But this wasn't like other attacks, this wasn't the Grue, or anything like that. They jammed the planet's computer systems like they were nothing - they crumpled the most powerful computers in Lor space like tinfoil! I managed to restart the traffic computer on the craft I was on, and we made it to the Vox with as many refugees as we could carry." 

 

He swallowed hard. "But not before the ships started hitting. They slowed down just enough that they weren't relativistic, just enough that we could see them coming before they hit! They didn't even bother with missiles or energy weapons, they just rammed arcologies and sent them crashing into each other like those wooden blocks of Eira's! I must have seen...tens of thousands of people, just..." He waved his hand, and for a moment he couldn't speak. 

[Electra]

"Take your time," Miss A murmured, her eyes locked on the screens as she watched the disaster unfolding in real time from Sharl's perspective. Far away she could feel her stomach twisting from the horror of what he'd seen, but she locked it away and hoped she wouldn't vomit while she was gone. "Do you know anything about who the attackers were? You said something earlier about the Star Khan, but those don't look like Stellar Khanate ships." They didn't look like anything she'd seen before, and even though Gina's specialty wasn't space, the fact that they were completely foreign was not good news. She thought she'd gotten a good handle on all the major spacegoing races after having to go rescue Steve from the Curator's ringworld. If this were some new threat, they could all be in deep trouble. 

[Avenger Assembled]

"They called themselves...the Communion." At Sharl's words, the face of Star-Khan appeared in his memories (albeit horribly changed). "Their leader looked like Star-Khan, but he looked altered, like somebody who'd been forcibly cyborged. Not like Murdock was," he went on, "he could still talk, and think, but he was theirs. They said that surrender didn't matter, that resistance didn't matter, that they were going to take the whole planet and turn it into raw material for themselves." He rubbed his eyes. "We made it to the Vox and the refugees started pulling out. I went into the system to stop cyber-infiltration and these horrible...things were in there waiting for me. If I wasn't me, if I was any other sentient software I've met, they'd have torn me apart and turned me into one of them." 

 

He fell silent again as his memories progressed. "We got everybody out we could, but it still wasn't enough. Even the Lor can't evacuate a whole planet that fast. I remember how excited everyone was when the Star Knights arrived - people actually turned around and started taking holos!" he exclaimed, pain raw in his voice. "I didn't see what happened but there was this big ship in the sky, it looked as big as Terra's moon. It had enough energy to crack open a planetary crust, and the Star Knights took the brunt of the first attack. They just flared up...and then they were gone." 

[Electra]

Miss Americana paled, a nifty feat of autonomically-controlled hydraulics that she didn't even have time to admire under the circumstances. "So what you're saying, in a nutshell, is that this Communion swept in from space and in a matter of what, a day, hours even, they wiped out the Star Knights and destroyed Lor-Van?" On a separate screen from the one running through Sharl's program, she began searching for The Communion, wondering if there was some big player in space she'd simply missed in her research. "Did they say, could you tell where they might be going next?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"No, nothing. I don't even know for sure what happened to Lor-Van," he added grimly. "But I saw the numbers on that big planet killer - and once those Star Knights were gone, there wasn't anything to stop them. The last thing I saw was the big gun going off again, and then I was back in the network. I was totally out the whole way there," he added, "and back again." He held out his hand, not to Miss A, but as if touching someone who wasn't there - someone he would never be able to touch, or see again. "It wasn't even a war, or a battle. It was a freaking MASSACRE!" he cried in a moment's despair. "They had no warning, no time to mobilize anything...the Star Knights must have warped in themselves only to fly right into the teeth of that damned...thing." His head came up. "You said you worked with one in our sector - Cavalier, right? Do you have his contact information?" 

[Electra]

"Yes, I worked with him once, I think I have his contact information tucked away somewhere," Miss A said absently. "Though god knows if he's going to be available for consultation, under the circumstances." She ran a hand over one of her many screens, enhancing a section of text she'd been scrolling through. "Here's one hero currently local to the area who's at least been talking about the Communion. I'm going to try and get in touch by email, send over what information we've got and see if they can help. No phone calls to strangers in the middle of the night, not yet anyway." 

 

She stepped away from the screen, ran both hands through her blond hair and dislodged a half-dozen silver bobby pins. "God, I can't believe I don't know anything about space! It just didn't seem that important at the time! Dragonfly," she decided suddenly. "She's been to space, she should know about this anyway." Jamming her hand down on the comm console, she fed the phone number directly into the system with a crackle of energy, trying all the genius inventor's contact numbers at once. 

[Fox]

When her cell phone had gone off, Mara had dismissed the call with a distracted wave of the hand, silencing the presumed telemarketer's ringing and making a mental note to do nasty things to their infrastructure when she had the chance.

When one of her online phone services went off, the coincidence prompted a raised eyebrow and a momentary glance away from the device on her workbench. Still, though, it was silenced; the prevalence of digital calling services didn't put the probabilities of two calls outside the realm of possibility.

When an old cell phone on one of the far benches went off, suddenly it had her attention. That phone had been almost completely locked down, operating on some (at the time) sophisticated filters and a whitelist. It had been a necessary precaution: it was the phone she'd used before she'd made her suit, in her gauntlets-and-visor days. Precious few people had that number.

Lights danced behind her eyes as she redirected the call to her warehouse computer, its large, central screen lighting up in response. "If you are a telemarketer, you are about to lose your database," she warned, turning her attention back to her work. "Otherwise, you have reached Dragonfly. Very tired, kind of busy, remind me to give you updated phone number later. Speak."

[Electra]

"You're not an easy woman to get ahold of!" Miss Americana's dulcet voice piped over the speakers. "And if you're getting calls at..." a momentary pause, "quarter after three in the morning, I think that's grounds for more than purging a database. But not tonight." Despite the natural polish in the genius CEO's words, the speed of her voice and the slight edge in her inflection gave her nerves away. It was enough to remind Mara slightly of the dumpy, frightened young woman who hid behind the perfect persona. "We've got big trouble. Sharl just data-dumped back from his trip to Lor-Van, with news that there's no Lor-Van there anymore. Some alien fleet came along and blew the whole place to kingdom come. Do you know anything about a group called The Communion?"

[Fox]

Mara bit her lip for a moment, peering down into the guts of her...whatever it was...to get a fiddly bit of wire into place. "Nnnno," she answered, brain catching the last piece first. "Should I? Sounds aggressively religious. Kind of name a cult gives thems---what do you mean 'no Lor-Van there anymore'?" She glanced up at the screen, for all that there wasn't a video feed, mad science momentarily forgotten.

"Can't just blow up a planet," she insisted, though her brain immediately put the lie to it. asteroid slingshot from deep space - magnetic field to redirect and accelerate basically a railgun on much larger scale cooling actually harder in space thermal conductivity of near-vacuum poor - energy lance from near orbit - power requirements enormous - energy cascade to planet core? - requires in-depth knowledge of core compos---

She shook her head. no "Energy requirements for reasonable planet-killer solutions are unreasonable," she corrected, a bit of concern creeping into her voice. "Not overly familiar with space civilizations. Got into League databases once, though - briefly. Homeworld for a major player, yes? Bold target. Don't like it, if it's true. ....not that I don't appreciate the knowledge, but why call me?"

[Electra]

"I don't know from unreasonable," Miss A shot back impatiently, "but I've downloaded Sharl's memory files and watched whatever that weapon is disintegrate what had to be five hundred Star Knights in one shot. Which might be burying the lead, come to think of it." Mara could hear her blow out a breath over the phone line. "Sharl evacuated through their Vox before it could take a second shot, but he said it was undamaged and recharging fast, with nothing there to stop it. The Lor were jumping off-planet like fleas on a hot griddle, but there wouldn't have been time..." 

 

She was silent for a moment. "I didn't know who to call," she finally admitted her voice softer, almost abashed. "That thing is entirely beyond my scope, and not many things are. But you know weapon tech, and you've been to space a few times. Can I send you the data, at least?"

[Fox]

Mara flinched like she'd been slapped, too off-guard to be prepared for the bluntness of the assertion...but she couldn't say it was wrong. That was probably what still hurt the most. "...yes, okay," she conceded. A quick thought to the computer sent a pattern of data back up the line - senseless noise to a phone network, but a private connection protocol to something as evolved as whatever Miss Americana was likely calling from.

She swept a long section of her workbench clean, the scraping of metal and circuits audible even over the speakers, and grabbed a nearby stack of over-sized draft papers to plop down in the cleared space. "Give me whatever you have. All of it; said Star Knights, plural. News to me - not too surprising in retrospect - but one we know is...durable. Tearing through that and still cracking a planet is...an engineering problem. Eliminates easiest solutions. Need details to rule out others. Audio, visual, distortion, interference, anything."

[Electra]

"I'll send you what I've got, the rest will take awhile." Data began flowing over the connection, a very large amount of data already. "Decoding data is its own special challenge when the receiver is as close as a computer can possibly come to simulating a human being. I have protocols in place to access Sharl's visual and audio memory, but the rest is much more tenuous. I imagine you'll want to talk to him eventually, but he's very shaken right now." The audiovisual data was easy to access and play, though nauseating to watch for the first minute or so. The recording was binaural and near panoramic, eyes and ears seeing and hearing in real time and space, the ultimate shaky-cam experience. "He's on-planet and running most of the time, so unfortunately the angle is not good for seeing a lot of the fight. Check out the cyberkinetic baddies at 14:33:12 as well, they're some nasty viral pieces of work." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"And we need to call the Interceptors too," said Sharl tentatively, knowing Miss Americana had a complicated relationship with that team at the best of times. "The princess I spoke to, she knew Terran superheroes, she wanted me to pass a message on to Jack of all Blades or Geckoman." Sharl had met the former only once and couldn't remember if he'd ever met the latter - but was more inclined to call his fellow Young Freedom veteran. "It was...I need to tell them she's all right." At least I think she is. Space was full of horrors for the unwary, as Sharl himself knew only too well after his recent trip to Lor-Van. He leaned back and ran his hands across his now-unmarred face, the wounds he'd taken in the battle with the Communion virii completely healed. "I guess everybody's going to need to know. What I saw wasn't going to stop with just one planet, even with Lor-Van." 

[Fox]

Mara felt sick. The only thing that kept her from actually being sick was, to her bitter gratitude, the same thing that made her capable of analyzing what was happening in the data feed in the first place - her fear response was fundamentally broken, and she knew it, and she knew that it was probably the only reason she hadn't done more than stand and watch in horror as the...planet-killer...fired down toward the surface.

The home-grown program she'd made for analyzing energy patterns was complaining that it couldn't do much with the data at hand and unknown variables; she dismissed it. It wouldn't help.

"It's...you can't build them on that scale," she weakly insisted, though her brain already was...assuming near-infinite resources. Or close enough to infinite for rational minds. "It's insane. You just can't. Or don't. Some kind of energy lance, probably not a technical term, whatever...directed energy weapon. But it's too much. Overkill. Secondary purpose? I...."

She ran a hand back through her hair, drawing a breath. "....I need data. Going to see what I can get on my end, too. Need to know what happened after; data feed cuts off at the important part. Damage pattern, active radiation dispersal - kills organic targets before or after shattering crust? - fragmentation size, remains of back half of planet vs. unstable toroid....?"

She waved a hand, already drawing something on her paper. "Don't now how helpful I'll be, never...worked at that scale, but I'll try. Send anything you have. Go make your calls. I need...time. And bad ideas."

[Electra]

"I'll keep you informed," Miss A promised. "I'm sure the League probably knows through their own channels already, and I don't really have any connections with anyone there. I could call Midnight II, I suppose. He has his own spaceship, he must get up into space sometimes. And Earth is unfortunately a little bit low on spacefaring vessels these days. Call me if you come up with anything, or if you need anything. All of ArcheTech's resources are available till we get this figured out. Talk to you later." 

 

Disconnecting the call, Miss A rubbed her temples delicately with one hand. "I'm going to need to disconnect to get some more fuel into me, but we still need to rally the troops. Why don't you go ahead and contact the Interceptors and tell them what you know," she suggested to Sharl. "I've got their contact information in my database. Send them whatever information you think is relevant. I'll be back in five minutes." She sat down in her desk chair and closed her eyes, seeming to go to sleep all at once. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Where once Sharl might have sat in front of a Terran computer to steady himself, he'd long since surpassed the need for that kind of direct connection to Terran computer architecture. He opened Miss Americana's database as if scrolling through thoughts in his mind, the monitors in the room flicking back and forth as he accessed their system. He found the number for the Interceptors; albeit one that looked old, then settled on one for one of the members in particular. Geckoman had been quite the subject of conversation on Young Freedom thanks to stories handed down from year to year - and his contact information looked to be current. He 'dialed' the number mentally and waited for the human on the other end to pick up. "Hello? Is Geckoman there?" 

[Ecalsneerg]

Sharl waited a moment as the phone rang, then heard some fumbling on the other end of the line. Geckoman sat at the large desk in front of his computer in the Arborealair. He'd slotted his phone into the terminal as it rang, interfacing with the circuitry to form a voice interface.

 

He spun in his chair as the connection opened up along the interface. One one of the multiple screens, a plain navy screen appeared, with a white line along the centre oscillating along with callers' speech. The number dialled from appeared at the bottom in large red letters in a traditional digital font. Weird. He wasn't entirely familiar with this number or the voice. "This is Geckoman, hi. Sorry, this isn't a number a lot of people have, you know how it is, can't have everyone ringing up? How'd you get a hold of it?" He paused and shook his head rapidly. "Sorry, wrong question. Who's this, and what's the issue?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"This is Sharl Tulink," said Sharl carefully "I am the hero known as Citizen. I was on the third Young Freedom team when I was at Claremont." He was picking his words carefully, trying to stay ahead of his rapidly moving thoughts. "You know, we were the ones who threw down with the Curator and...uh, listen, I have a message for you from Iana Th'emme of the Lor Republic." He swallowed and went on, "Today an unknown alien species called the Communion attacked Lor-Van and destroyed it utterly. I believe Th'emme escaped to safety on the orbital cities before the final bombardment, but I..." Memories were flooding back as he remembered the courage on the young woman's face. "She wanted me to warn you and the Interceptors about what happened. Lor-Van is gone." 

[Ecalsneerg]

"What." Geckoman was speechless. Lor-Van... gone? How... what... "That's... c'mon, who's... most things aren't that powerful, even the Gorgon was only putting planets into stasis, not annihilating them. You can't just... you can't just destroy planets!" His mind raced back and forth and up and down inside his skull. What. What.

 

"Alright," he said, pinching his nose and leaning over the console. "I need to know two things. How sure are you that she got out alive? Is she safe? And... you said she was warning us. Are you saying that this thing is heading to Earth? And if that's what you're saying, which I reee-EEEEEEEE-ally hope you're not. What do we do?"