Minas Tirith, Arda, Menelmacar
35 Quellë 31935
Morilindendil held a position of great gravity; as a keeper of the Apacenyapaca, the Seer Court of Menelmacar, she was one of those charged with maintaining the eternal watch of the homeland. She had many colleagues and companions in this task, and many had more trying provinces than her own, for she was among the watchers of the Menelmacari heartland upon Arda. In ancient days, when ten thousand years ago the lands here had been a primaeval wilderness, her current residence had been raised up, and it bore an even more ancient name, Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard, a name of several fortresses in history, both elven and mannish. It was dominated by a pale tower that had once been a great lighthouse that could be seen by mariners from afar and which was now a pinnacle for tourists to view the eastern ocean.
The Watch Keepers kept their offices in the inner ward of the tiered city, and she had taken a moment to appreciate the gloaming Hours of Night, while the lights across the city were extinguished and the stars above shone unhindered. Changes in the things she watched were rare enough that time to step away was no lack of diligence; the overwatch systems were always active at any rate.
The air was cool and the wind was the high silken wind of the autumnal seas; in an hour the gleaming spires, streets, and towers would spoil the view a little, but still. Tracing the stars of Soronúmë she was lost for a moment, enjoying the slow twist of the stars with precession, trying to match them up to her childhood, ten thousand years ago.
A chime sounded; broken off immediately, this was not a call but an aural cue to focus her attention on a priority message. “Probability matrix collapse event in progress. Emergency alert.”
She spun on her heel and stepped inside, her small coterie of knife-missiles closing in around her as the station went onto alert, the crimson lights within rising a little, easing her eyes for the holographic screens projected across the room.
The largest of the screens painted an extremely simplified picture of the overall situation locally at any given time. According to complex metrics, it was the synthesis of data from countless sources, the overall path to direct security and prosperity for the homeland; there was an intoxicating quality in data, an idea that because numbers could be assigned, absolute truth could be told.
That wasn’t quite true, and the art of defining and analyzing threats was a complex discipline. And yet the art of finding the best ways to ensure prosperity and freedom was one that made that look like child’s play.
A simple display such as this could never display anything except the simplest of information, even the displays around it that displayed stochastic matrices of probabilities assigned to thousands of variables were imprecise, for it took lifetimes to learn to understand such things.
Unless there was some great crisis going on, then it was very easy to do so.
The main display was amending itself second by second, the effect of data being parsed as quickly as it came in, the artificial intelligence checking data and amending it. It was already actionable, though she was not sure what had triggered the unprecedented revisions.
She was an expert in one thing that machines were poor at, no matter how transapient they were; she was a song-hearer, and her talents lay in picking the threads of fate, and her understanding of the intricate calculus that was displayed around her and the integrated instrumentalities that were used to draw from the complex library of prophecy and prediction.
She cast out her mind, speaking words of power as she turned from the displays to the water held in a plate of silver and silima-crystal. Her spirit saw what her eyes did not, and the world parted to show a design long set in motion.
“What targets are we firing at?” asked Warlady Carningortonis nos Fithurin, CINCSOLCOM, as she entered the command center. The chamber was configured for a bombardment, and the planetary surface was displayed beneath her feet, showing the ocean, and an inner perimeter showing the vast island city. Icons of crimson showed targets as they were taken down, sensor sweeps that used sensor-dust displaced into the air inside buildings giving the resolution to accurately target the city.
The guns from orbital weapons platforms and ships of the home fleet occasionally pulsed starfire in torrents into the city’s upper reaches and outer wards. The vessels in the harbors on the edge of the City had not yet finished sinking, but they were all holed and beyond even the meager combat that they were capable of.
“The Seer Court reported a probability of a critical threat within the day,” the crisp avatar of Arien, the Sol Defense fleetmind said. “We have determined that a measured force response is optimal,” she continued, “we believe the threat is principally necromantic and large scale death will accelerate the danger; as such, simply erasing the area with heavy weapons would likely precipitate the crisis.”
Carni leaned on a railing around the viewing area, her hand gesturing toward the area. Some thought that being the commander of a force that relied increasingly on artificial intelligence would be a challenge, but this was far from the truth; the Warlady had been a senior officer for long enough to have seen the battle-space evolve, and she had never been in the business of expecting her command to wait on her orders before taking action. The Menelmacari Imperial Defense Force -- the Oiraórëlë Horma to use its Quenya name -- had never been in favor of waiting for orders from on high before acting when necessary; a thousand years ago Carningortonis might have awoken to find that one of her flotillas had reacted to a threat, today it was an integrated response from the Ardan command.
“What can we do next?” she asked, content to take the analysis from the situation before giving her input.
“We are getting no-transit effects in several areas,” Arien said, “we are removing conventional military and policing assets across the island, but we will need to decide on either carrying out a full bombardment on shielded areas or an intrusion to take control directly.” The map peeled back to show several substantial areas of the city, overlaid in black.
Carni didn’t protest that there was no means known that the Regent’s forces could have been able to block teleportation and sensors. Questioning the clearly possible wasn’t her business; that was something the analysts could be relied on to work on and present her with the moment the suppositions became relevant. The decision that needed to be made was a military one.
“Some of these are going to be decoys,” she suggested, looking at the blacked-out areas of the map. We’re going to have to move on them all though. Do we have any information on them?”
Arien blinked once, reviewing the available data; she was, like many of the larger scale fleetmind avatars, named after the Ainur of early Quendi history. The maia in question had been the personification of fire, cousin to the balrogs; but the first of their kindred, brighter and hotter, and not among those who had followed Melkor into rebellion. Even the holographic avatar that represented this homage to the true Arien was a pillar of fire in the raiment of a woman, her warmth an echo of the blistering heat of the true form. “We have a contact coming in from one of the embedded local assets moving in on that area. Bringing the feed up now,” Arien said.
The business of rebellion was rarely accomplished without several things: training, discipline, the will to fight, and communication with other groups; rebellions were rarely spontaneous and they were rarely successful. Those that were successful often had a distinct advantage in the form of an established power group with a government’s resources working with them, often a disaffected or ambitious element of the extant government but at times, a foreign government.
There were few governments more capable of providing that support than the Ascendancy, and they had long ago taken a hands-off approach to the Island of Vinyaangmar, a policy born when other Melkoric nations had been active in the Sol System. That a time would come to deal with this last metastasis of the cancer that had once permeated the Sol System was undeniable, and with the patience of their ageless breed, the Menelmacari had prepared for this day.
That the Regent’s forces had brought the day forward was the only surprise.
The cell that Canyel was with had been one of a number that had been found within the City, for there were always those who would resist tyranny given half a chance, and while trade had kept the City alive, it had been a means to make sure that weapons, armaments and intelligence could enter and leave. The alternative, entirely Interdicting the city, would have made Canyel’s job far harder.
The group had no name; it had no literature or propaganda. There were groups that did give themselves names, that served to spread hope and keep alive the hope of revolt, but those with true military goals did not broadcast their existence. Canyel knew of sixteen groups within the city, and he could contact four of them. He had been inserted sixteen years ago, and had helped recruit more than sixteen groups, for sabotage tasks, insurrection tasks, and more.
He was of the Handë, the Rangers, a part of the Menelmacari intelligence services that led such tasks.
There were two dozen dead members of the Internal Guard at his feet, he had been alerted to the action by the lances of starfire that were sweeping the accessible parts of the city, and his group had gone to its immediate plan, weapons were taken from concealment, they had joined together and moved as swiftly as was possible.
Talia, one of the most avid of the group, had moved ahead, handling the gun with ease. A stolen weapon of the Internal Guard, it was a short carbine built for solid reliability. She’d taken it from one of the dead Guards, and they’d all loaded up as they’d advanced. The sweep of the city being carried out by the fleet in orbit was startlingly effective, even against small ground assets.
“Enemy ahead!” she snapped, and fired a burst from the weapon.
Canyel was as human was Talia was, though he had been born in a far more fortunate place. “I’m live with support now,” he called. “Range and bearing?”
“Sixteen meters, up Canning-street, this tier.”
The area ahead exploded with fire, as a beam of plasma and exotic particles emerged from a fissure in the fabric of spacetime where they had been. Here under the influence of whatever sensor jamming the Regent’s forces had produced, it was not as precise as it had been where scanning was perfect, and the plasma lance was not confined; instead, it became something akin to a titanic flamethrower that burned through the roadway ahead of the group, leaving whatever horror had been in the way reduced to ash and cinders, and the route on fire.
“Happy to report the long guns still work even if we can’t get supply drops by displacer this far in. Troops are on their way,” Canyel said, “but they’ll take a few minutes to get down to this level unless they want to bulldoze their way through the tiers above us.” The black zone had become an area of interest. Already within it, Canyel’s group had been fast to step up to the plate, and what had started with a few small arms and knife missiles was now moving up to a significant intrusion.
Canyel drew a hologram from his watch and watched the sensor reports of the scout-missile cluster that he had deployed, there was a tangle of contacts but resolving them in this area was limited. The sensor jamming that affected the fleet seemed to be deteriorating his own abilities; Talia wouldn’t normally have needed to spot enemy contacts.
Pausing wasn’t an option, though they had to make their way carefully past the boiling vapor trapped within the enclosed arcology structure by the support fire they occasionally called down; Canyel and his volunteers were all well aware that the prudent thing for them to do for most people in this environment would be to wait for a more developed intrusion force; but of course, that was people who wanted to leave and live, more than they wanted to shoot the Regent’s minions.
While most people wanted to live and prosper as their first priority, the people that joined resistance cells, in this case especially, wanted to put their blades in the beast’s side far more.
The scout missiles did report one thing though, and it was a thing that made Canyel steel himself for the fight of his life.
“Castellan, up ahead,” he said, drawing a blade that kindled a crimson light on its blade as the enemy approached, an ancient pattern of weapon; he flicked the intensity control of his plasma-pistol to its maximum.