By David C. Daoust
The words of Dakota Sun rocked the small moon of Twin Crown.
The port town of Grady was in an uproar as protesters threatened to storm the gates of the barrack-ships of the current governing power that owned the small moon that orbited the gas giant Neo Vir’ees, the governing power known as the Red Faction.
None took the news as hard as the First Wavers, as they had the most casualties of the outbreak. To find out that the infection was intentional… sent them all gunning for whom to blame.
Craiden’s initial reaction was an all out assault on the Port Town of Grady, using none other than the Battle Drones packed away on the abandoned ship. The abandoned ship Craiden had infiltrated and robbed the very same day as Dakota Sun’s tell-tale video was released to the public.
The staging point of Craiden’s planned raid was a small clearing outside of Grady’s gates. Craiden and his crew had the drones unpacked and ready to go long before Mari Haul could speak reason to her son.
How exactly the small woman had managed to convince Craiden to stay his hand, was beyond Vincent.
But just because Craiden had seen reason, that didn’t mean Vincent had. The Mining-Bot had found a new life aboard the Sand Crawler. He had befriended Charles’ sons much the same way he had befriended their father. Vincent had taken to Junior as a brother, and spent much of Craiden’s childhood in the shell of a hover-bot, playing in the sands with the boy. Any history of the Crucible Riots, or what he had done to that Foreman before he had a grasp on ‘idle threats’ were left in the Core, far from his new life aboard the Sand Crawler.
To watch Junior choke and die on black oily mucus, was the hardest thing Vincent had ever witnessed, to find that it was intentionally done, was unforgivable.
To say the least, Vincent’s grasp on life was not complete. Death was merely a stage of a human’s life to Vincent, either they were alive, or they were dead. Vincent knew they did not like to die. He did not like that his friends were dead. It pained him.
He planned to spread the pain.
The only regret Vincent felt as he flipped the switch that would launch the arachnid-like Battle Drones deep into the port town of Grady and raze it from the moon once and for all, was that he did not have a way to profit off the attack, as he was sure his dear friend Charles Haul Sr. would have had. Not that old Charles was dead; just that his mind was not what it had once been. The old devil still plagued the card table, he just rarely had anything cohesive to say, many times he would rant about old wars and riots, but his mind only held bits and pieces at a time.
Vincent was unsure if his Old friend even grasped that his eldest son was dead, that was OK though, Vincent would take care of it. Death begets death, war begets war, all that jazz…
—-
So many changes had come over the civilization since the Ark Ships had ceased their long journey, that humanity was overcome. Very few people agreed on anything. The wars that plagued the Onion were many. People were unsure how to live outside of a packed population, how to live alone or free, to do anything that was not immediately monitored by everyone else in the community, Humanity had to relearn what Freedom was.
The fighting raged for years through the Onion. Droids interfered rarely in the affairs of man. Man killing man was deemed a part of the universe, man killing nature, also in their programming as nature taking its course. Ark Ships were man-made machines at their core, questioning the creator was hard to do. Whilst Ark Ships did many things to protect life, they did not protect man from man. They would not interfere with their wars, nor help with their supply lines for said wars, they would however treat the injured, and they would provide sanctuary for those that asked for it.
The Ark Ships saw themselves as entities onto themselves, their AI, the brains of the Universe; their droids were their blood cells. Those droids that cured the ill- were white bloods cells, the workers- red. So when man created Battle Drones, machines free of the Ark Ships intelligence, built for the sole purpose to destroy, that intelligence deemed these creations a virus.
Once the Ark Ships understood fully what these things were, more than a mere tool, as a gun or star-fighter is, there was not a droid in the entire universe that would not suddenly drop everything they were doing to destroy Drones on sight. To say what Colin Vice had smuggled through the universe was illegal, was more than a little bit understated. Battle Drones were not banned by any law of man; it was banned by the very universe the Ark Ships saw themselves as.
So when the dark swarm of battle drones appeared on the horizon, flying over the high walls of Grady, every Droid in the town did just that, dropped everything they were doing, much to the populations horror, for the chaos that ensued by the Battle Drones’ sudden attack was just escalated by the sudden retaliation, of the Droids!
