Nova Wars

No inspection ready unit is fit for combat. No unit fit for combat is inspection ready. - Unknown, Age of Paranoia, TerraSol

Specialist Grade Five Gulgulka was a Drimarian, a cold blooded being of the type that fills the ranks of secret police and bureaucracies the galaxy over. Pleas, begging, cries of mercy, none of it mattered to a being like Gulgulka. He was unmoved by requests for pity just as he was unmoved by personal hardship. He was almost biologically incapable of excitement or extremes of emotion.

Which was why Specialist Grade Five Armkept, the 625th Telkan Marine Brigade Master Armorer, was staring at him wide eyed and thinking about sidling over to the door and making a break for it.

"I have, I believe, mentioned that my first duty station was with the Lanaktallan Star Herd," Gulgulka was saying. His eyes were wide, he kept licking his lips, and his hands were clasped together tightly.

Armkept just nodded, wondering if the Senior Divisional Master Armorer had cracked under the pressure.

"As such, I was exposed to Lanaktallan historical documentaries," Gulgulka stated. He moved over to the hologram projector in Armkept's armory.

Armkept had seen Gulgulka walk calmly across an ammunition locker where the 4.2 inch mortar rounds were screaming at the 155mm artillery shells to smack them both back into line, ignoring the smoke and heat.

The Drimarian practically scurried over to the holotank.

"Lanaktallan documentaries are an acquired taste," Gulgulka stated. "The section detailing how it was theorized the Sentience Upload Disaster System worked was a 12 hour section of the documentary, going deep into Terran biological idiosyncrasies as well as their unique cerebral biology."

Armkept just nodded, shifting a little closer to the door.

Gulgulka was a little too close to the loaded M19 Magnetic Accelerator Sidearm than Armkept was comfortable with.

"With the return of the Terrans, due to the return of TerraSol to n-space, I began rewatching the documentary series covering the ancient Council-Confederacy Conflict that led to the Terran Extinction Event, commonly called the TXE at that time frame," Gulgulka said. He began punching holokeys on the holotank.

Armkept moved a little closer to the door.

"Yes, yes, it was vital I look over the documentary again. Not only to attempt to understand the Terrans, but there was something there. I knew there was something there. Something I had seen before and since," Gulgulka said. "But it was not one documentary, no, there are three key points to what I discovered."

Gulgulka looked at Armkept and Armkept felt the fur just behind and between his ears raise up.

The Drimarian looked crazed.

"It was not the Second Precursor War as a whole that was creating invoked memory stimulus in my mind," Gulgulka said. He turned back to the holocontrols. "I initially began looking up a forty-thousand year documentary, which only exists in Lanaktallan recreational cold storage databases, to understand the Terrans that have joined our forces just as I examined the Lanaktallan and the Telkan when I was stationed with them."

"All right," Armkept said. He figured maybe speaking might calm the Drimarian down. "Why do you need me?"

Gulgulka turned and stared at Armkept for a long moment.

"You were not afraid to tell me that I had misinterpreted doctrine regarding arms room maintenance," Gulgulka stated. "You, correctly, realized that I have no interest in personal glory or aggrandizement."

Armkept just nodded.

"You will not be afraid to tell me if my suppositions are in error, while also questioning any weak points in my hypothesis," Gulgulka said. "Others may agree with me outwardly while not believing me, others might disregard my hypothesis without examining the evidence, believing that ancient history has no bearing upon our current situation."

"Very well," Armkept felt better now that he was three steps from the door.

The Drimarian fast forwarded through the documentary. Even jumping by twenty chapters at a time, it still took nearly five minutes for the Drimarian to stop on the first one. He then moved to the second one.

Material and Logistics Challenges was the beginning of the documentary, but Armkept missed what the rest of it said as Gulgulka began to fast forward by a dozen chapters at a time.

"Shades. Shades were the key to proper memory invocation," Gulgulka said.

"Phasic impressions of Terrans killed while enraged in a high phasic environment," Armkept said. "What does..."

"Shades ended the Second Precursor War. Propagating through the superluminal communication arrays, infesting the upper bands of jumpspace and the lower bands of hyperspace. For several centuries those bands were referred to as "ghostspace" and "shadespace" respectively," Gulgulka said.

"Ships still hit pockets now and then," Armkept said. "It's why we use counter-shade methods whenever we travel."

"Yes! Counter-shade!" Gulgulka stated.

The third one was a fleet engagement. Armkept could tell by the timestamps and the humungous Mar-gite constructs on the screen.

Gulgulka fast forwarded it, rewound it, then stopped it.

He opened another window and loaded up some files.

"BEHOLD!" Gulgulka said, harrumphing several times and pointing at the four windows.

"What is it?" Armkept said.

"No, no, cannot tell you," Gulgulka said. "You must look at evidence and come to your own conclusion," he looked at the time on his datalink. "You have six hours before we are to report to Corps Military Intelligence and Analysis Section," he looked around slyly. "I once helped their senior analyst pass an arms room inspection by working for three days straight. His commander, at the time, was secretly angry that the arms room passed even his high level inspection," Gulgulka clenched his hands with glee. "I took great satisfaction in the commanding officer's anger."

Armkept moved over to the holotank and looked at the windows.

"That one first," Gulgulka said.

It was a map of the galaxy. Armkept hit play.

The screen suddenly covered with white. It faded, and the documentary narrator went in to how the "Great Flash" AKA "The Galactic Phasic Flashbang" completely covered entire light decades in split seconds, all generated from stars. There were graphs and charts showing energy breakdown, propagation rates, all kinds of data that made no sense to Armkept.

Gulgulka paused it on the charts.

"Now this one," Gulgulka said. He pointed at the fleet engagement.

He played it and the playback ended with a white flash. Afterwards, there were energy readings and estimations, including propagation rates and radius of effect.

Gulgulka paused it.

Armkept looked back and forth.

The data was very close to matching.

"This one," Gulgulka said.

Armkept tapped the icon and it began playing.

It was an examination of the molecular circuitry used in reactors during the Great Flash. A technical breakdown of the degredation of the molecular circuitry, including estimations for the reasons. There was a series of graphs showing the cascading resonance failures as well as the energy vibrational cascade affecting even heavily shielded military grade reactors past a certain threshhold.

Gulgulka paused it.

"This one," Gulgulka said.

Armkept hit play and watched. It was his own examinations of the armor of several of the Telkan Marines that had been exposed to the white flash that had disabled nearly all of the Confederate Space Force vessels, the powers armor, the armored vehicles, and universally crashed out the civilian electronics.

Then it was Gulgulka doing the same examination on armor.

Gulgulka paused it.

Armkept looked back and forth between the windows.

"How was the Great Flash initiated?" Armkept asked.

"It was never discovered. It emanated from tens of thousands of stellar masses. It was assumed to be some kind of Terran doomsday weapon targeting phasic species," Gulgulka stated. "It only happened a single time and was determined, according to the documentaries I have doublechecked, to be a method of eliminating the Terran Phasic Shade infestation of the galactic spur."

Armkept just nodded, taking a look at the molecular circuitry examples.

The damage was nearly identical.

"Do you know a signals technician? Someone who works with molecular circuitry?" Armkept asked.

"Yes, yes, I know one. A Lanaktallan. Very detail oriented," Gulgulka said.

"Have him come here, I want to ask him questions but I don't want him to think I'm a crazy person," Armkept said.

"So, you believe there is something to what I have examined," Gulgulka said. "Although correlation does not equal causation, correlation can lead to the discovery of causation."

"You're definitely on to something," Armkept said. "Let's go over the flash and its immediate after effects, say, the next forty-eight hours."

Gulgulka nodded, still looking excited. "You will like this part, Telkan."

"Why?" Armkept asked as Gulgulka bookmarked the timestamp then fast forwarded the documentary.

"Because, there are images and sound recordings of one of the most famous Telkan to exist. One the features prominently in Lanaktallan historical documents," Gulgulka said. He paused it.

The Telkan staring out of the screen had cybernetic eyes, white streaks in his facial fur, two obvious cybernetic ears.

His eyes glowed red.

"LIEUTENANT COLONEL (TELKAN MARINES) VUXTEN" was on the chyron.

-----

Captain N'Skrek looked at his staff, then at the data in the middle of the conference table.

It had been collated less then three hours prior and immediately forwarded to him.

"We'll have to drop out of hyperspace and deploy the needlecaster," N'Skrek said.

"Energy profiles are a match," Vice Admiral Breakheader said. He shook his head. "The fact they hid signals in the pulse to affect the molecular circuitry in order to induce resonance signals to hotload a virus shows that this had significant planning."

"Is there any way to overcome it?" N'Skrek asked his Chief of Engineering.

The Chief nodded. "We use Terran thinking wires."

"What's the difference, aside from the fact they're from over forty-thousand years ago," N'Skrek asked.

"They're Terran. They don't like other people touching them," the Chief of Engineering chuckled. "This thing was built on Mars. The Mars."

N'Skrek just chuckled and shook his head.

"All right. Signal the rest of the fleet. We'll drop and deploy the needlecaster," he ordered.

-----

The ship sat in the gulf between galaxies where there wasn't even space dust to accumulate on the hull after tens of thousands of years.

The ship was massive, measuring in the hundreds of miles long and tens of miles thick. The great bell housings for the engines were larger than most capital ships. There were massive bubbles on the sides, containing complete ecologies fed by esoteric means.

Ecologies that had gone wild from the radiation of deep space where the only light was from galaxies rather than individual stars.

The name on the hull was almost obliterated by time.

W - - DEN

There was a marking near the engines of the manufacturer.

TR--S-PLU-----IPYAR

The hieroglyphics were lost to time, warfare, and entropy.

The bridge was on the rear of the ship, in a tall castle-esque structure. Heavily armored, protected.

The bridge was a dead place. Full of dust, ironically enough from particle shed of the ceramic filters that kept the air sterile.

The bridge was manned by vac-suit clad skeletons still sitting at their posts. The monitors were unreadable, time and dust wiping away the messages that once burned with intensity.

In the captain's char the skeleton sat staring out the six foot thick crysteel window at the emptiness beyond.

A single light blinked under the Captain's vac-suited hand.

A slow pulse. One blink every month, down to the picosecond.

Something changed.

The blinking suddenly went rapid, two blinks a second.

Deep within the ship automated systems creaked to life. Computer cores, loaded with WORM and EPROM data, were put in place as the ancient and dead computer cores were removed. Automation took over.

The vac-suits stiffened and jerked in a strange parody of life as thick pinkish gel began filling the vac-suits of the crew members still sitting at their posts to the point of their skeletons being little more than dust held together by memory.

Deep in the ship, in a section wrapped in hundreds of meters of armor, totally inaccessible by physical means, a single monitor was live.

There were words burned into the screen.

NO SIGNAL DETECTED

Those words were dim, unlit now, as the cathode ray tube system shifted.

SIGNAL DETECTED had replaced it.

Commands went out to the massive drives.

Quantum drives powerful enough to each individually move a moon slowly came to life as age degraded parts failed and were replaced. Reactionless drives and grav-drives first stopped the tumbling of the ship then oriented it on its target.

A small energetic galaxy.

The drives, all repaired, began to glow sullenly.

Space rippled as the ship got underway, scrunching up space in front of it, riding the bumpy folds, and letting it smooth out behind them.

The radiation cascade that had killed the initial crew had long ago been solved, and instead was used as energy to emit in order to speed the forward progress of the ship.

On the bridge, the suits were twitching, shivering.

The gel drained away.

Inside each suit was a Terran, eyes closed.

An electric shock through the chest, at the brainstem, made them all jerk.

The Captain opened his eyes, looking around.

I Live. I Die. I Live Again.

The Warden headed home.