Things began to move rather quickly for the two cruisers; and after Galina's hasty departure, enforced by their damned hosts, Visby and Appalachia turned to each other, and effectively huddled, before speaking in the Battlegroup's native language; a language that sounded like a halfway-house between Aramaic and English. Not one would hear a whit of their conversation, besides perhaps disjointed words that made no sense.
Appalachia spoke first. "I think they're worthy of our attention, Visby. I've heard of them before via the Trosseach-Confederation and they seem to be in a similar vein..."
Visby nodded. "I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. But I still want to feel them out a bit more. Can't be too careful. Still, at least we'll have walked out this with a possible client extra...hopefully." She paused. "If the bandit-state lets us leave, of course. That's something of a doubtful proposition, between you and me, but no matter. If trouble starts...I believe you brought marines?"
Appalachia grinned. "Aye. On standby and if we don't come back within three days, or if I trigger the alarm, they'll storm down."
"You're learning! Good!" Visby ruffled Appalachia's hair. "Told you you had this in the bag. Let's get a move on now, eh?"
Appalachia nodded, and the two headed for the bathysphere. Once in, they would descend.
The members of the Battlegroup's delegation gazed at Rapture's sights in different ways.
A bit of life had returned to Dana, and she and Helena seemed to gaze at it all with a critical and disapproving eye, while Sally seemed bored by it, occasionally snapping a picture for presumed later shitposting. Appalachia was overawed at the sight of the underwater city; but Visby?
Visby was livid. The sterile architecture reminded her of the Lombardic League's capital, back when she was still but a missile-cruiser. Both Venice and Rapture City pretended to greatness like a sewer rat that had scuttled onto the throne of a long-dead, murdered god, and proclaimed itself above the previous occupant. Their messages declared the primacy of the state and the state alone. The heart, the home and hearth; all was to be sacrificed on the pitiless altar of Ba'al that was the ambition of the Senate, or John Mercer and his clique. That Venice had more LEDs and was above the water, though only just barely, was it's only difference.
Soon the delegation would find themselves vomited back up again at the Kashmir Resturant, with Victor Von Stein's sudden apperance setting Helena on guard once more, with a practiced smile, while Sally simply stared, a wry, contemptous smile on her face. Appalachia seemed nervous, while Visby stared him down with a look of undisguised hostility.
After his apperance and departure, the delegation split up once more; Visby and Appalachia to seek out Galina and Cathach once more, while the other three remained near the center to mill about and wait for their hosts. The two had caught sight of them again, before a voice caused Visby to halt once more.
And upon seeing who that voice belonged to, her heart felt like it would leap into her throat and shatter once more.
"Appalachia, a moment please--" she hoarsely whispered, before slipping off into the crowd, leaving her near Galina.
"Vis - by." SVETLANA muttered. She had mistakenly attended a wedding with the girl, a while back. A good impression had been left on the colossal woman's frequently empty mind, a special place reserved for the Prusso-Polish ship. "Vis- Vis- Visby?" She said again. Stralavot looked up at her, to see her leaping and bounding excitedly in the direction of the Prusso-Poles? "How- How DOING, Visby?" She said.
Visby saw Svetlana bounding towards her, and was silent for a long time.
Memories flashed through her mind; of the wedding in a distant land, Scathach de Mag Mell, Satrayuga, and then Svetlana...
It was too much. Things fell apart; the centre could not hold, and mere anarchy was unleashed within Visby's mind.
Trickles of tears began to run down her face, as her mind barrelled on. Svetlana lead to Reinkalistan; Reinkalistan to Prussia-Poland, to Auntie Rota, Auntie Blazes, Massachusetts; the great collapse and reconstruction. Blauwalder, Saybrook-Cascadia, the Caspian Union; Baltimore, Avora, and Exeter. Her first sight of the dark-blue sky as a newly-built Renewal, and then the stars; oh, the stars! How free and vast they had first looked in that second youth, when she had been Blauwalder's shield and flaming sword, when she escorted colony-ships and chased down Lombard-pickets, her battlegroup like a wolf-pack as it hounded down enemy convoys and ponderous capitals.
'It was not enough.'
Decimation. Billions fleeing to the stars, sheparded by the shattered remains of the allied fleets.
Not all made it out.
'I was not enough.'
And with that thought, she flung herself into Svetlana's arms and cried.
But still her mind went forward.
The fleet wandered, for a little while, but fate brought them a chance for redemption. Blauwalder, Alenberg-Haestia, Caspia, Saybrook and Cascadia; they were gone, swallowed whole by the Leviathan. But the stars brought them new states; new, weaker Leviathans, and little states, just like theirs, struggling with all their might against them. Once again they became the sword and shield; but this time of a thousand tiny, nameless states. They were a simple, blunt but swift weapon, and one to which the heavy, ponderous vessels the lesser Leviathans used had no answer. For there was no planet, no weak link they could strike at. They would hound a patrol and it would scatter, later to reform and attack again. They would converge on a colony ship, only for that same ship to be the anvil upon which entire task-forces were battered to death by the hammer of the fleet.
Time and time again, they offered their swords and gave claws and teeth to the weak, with little expectation of gain. Time and time again, they slaughtered fleets, burned systems, razed fortresses, and sent Hegemon, Leviathan, and Bandit-State alike howling in fear. The nations they sheltered called them 'Archangels' - those they beat back, bloodied and bruised, 'Jackdaws', 'Magpies', and 'pirates'.
It could not last forever.
The lesser Levithans and Hegemons formed a compact; the Jovian Pact for Pirate-Suppression. The emperor of a strange Kingdom, vast but yet neither Hegemon nor Levitathan, offered them asylum and a planet in exchange for protection.
His court disagreed, and the Jovian Pact backed the Court.
The emperor did not last long; and neither did the Battlegroup. A vast fleet appeared on the fringes of their new system, close enough where the big guns on their ships made the difference, and with one capital carrying enough nuclear-fusion weaponry to render the already-settled planet a wasteland.
The battle raged for days after the Genocide of Tianjin. Rage, the desire for a last hurrah, kept shattered remnants fighting, carrying all ten-million left far enough to warp out of the system.
What fallowed was another period of wandering, reconsolidation, fighting off hunter-fleets and watching, in horror, as the states that they had guarded fell once again.
Mere chance found them in World Machine, a hunter-killer fleet hot on their tails. They fought again their endless wars; savaging the Kingdom and reducing it to a broken shell of itself, embroiled in perpetual civil war, to say nothing of the eternal bandit-suppression campaigns in World-Machine. Then came the campaigns against Octavia, and on it's heels the war against Drecha. A mere moment's respite followed, and, with the recovery of one of the long-lost Legacy-classes, perhaps a chance for renewal.
But still Visby wept. Nearly two billion dead and more from across time. All of Prussia-Poland, all of Blauwalder; it had come to this, and yet...they still went on, and on. And the thought, the terror, that it would all be for naught, burst like a dam from the recesses of her mind; not the first time it would, nor would it be the last. But it found her clinging to Svetlana like a child, and with the grief and joy of over a thousand years, she sobbed into her chest.
