Chapter Eight: Sarah Destroys the Earth

         A hypertropic plane shift drive could bring any ship at any point in real space to any location, gravitational stresses permitting. There were certain power and cost ratios that determined the practical limitations, but those could be ignored under times of duress. The signal that had been transmitted, via quantum entangled Q-bit reserves, had been exactly the kind of duress that the commanders of the far flung fleets of corporate humanity had been trained to respond to.

         The shareholders are in danger.

         And so, across the human sphere, a dozen brushfire wars were canceled nearly instantaneously. Ships screamed through atmospheres to scoop up Commanders, while robotic armies were left in standby mode – many of them literally posed like still life diorama recreations of battles on a full, lifelike scale. Weapons aimed, but not firing. Limbs drawn back for blows that would never land. Some of the Commanders left behind more ‘altruistic’ projects – which meant a few colonies who had been in the midst of a rescue from a cosmic disaster were left, screaming their heads off as their corporate support was withdrawn at the last second.

        One colony, about to be destroyed by an asteroidal impact, managed to avert disaster by overriding the corporate locks on their starship engines, allowing them to vacate the premises. They saved their lives – but their contracts stipulated that any damage done to the mining colony would be taken from their pay, retroactively. The asteroid that flattened their base, collapsed their mines, and immolated the hemisphere they had been settled on put each of the fifteen thousand workers into a debt that would take them several trillion years to pay off, assuming their standard pay of ten UN backed credits an hour.

        Another colony, soon to be sterilized by the sweeping wave of captured pulsar, solved their problem by hacking their maker and mass producing military grade EM shields to ward off the streams of high energy particles that would have killed each of them. They were facing an equally grim legal punishment in their future – hacking a maker was a crime worth of banishment and nerve stapling.

        A third colony, who had been under martial law due to the fact that the world they had settled on produced a natural aphrodisiac (an aphrodisiac they had been trying to package for shipment back to the SOL system for consumption), simply celebrated being left on their own by throwing an orgy. They would have been fined for illegal use of company property.

        Fortunately for each of these colonial settlements…by the time anyone heard of their crimes, the legal system that made them illegal in the first place would be on fire and the people who perpetuated it would be having a far, far, far worse day than any of them might have imagined upon waking up this morning.

***

        “Repeat!” The voice that filled the bridge of the Mulan Transgender Power Hour Apocalypse Boat was growing increasingly strident. It had started off as controlled and steady and almost monotone, then worked its way up and up the ascending scale of consternation. It was currently at, if Sarah measured it properly, at a seven out of eleven on the scale. “Your fleet is engaging in an illegal maneuver under the Geneva Convention on Interstellar Warfare. You are to cease your approach towards cislunar space immediately, or we shall open fire.”

        Sarah tried to feel as confident as she looked. But her stomach was roiling and turning over, end over end, inside of her. The corporate fleet that she had allowed to get mauled to bits was currently in a parking orbit around Jupiter, taking advantage of the sudden dispersal of readily accessible raw materials that had been kicked off by the destruction of three of Jupiter’s moons. The kinetic impactors that her fleet had used had thrown enough debris outwards into the high orbits of the Jovian system that each of the corporate ships simply needed to scoop up enough gravel for their onboard nanolathes to begin to produce repair components.

        They would be, in a word, fine. Doubly so with the Ahahahahhahahaha Get Bent Sucker and the Communism Kills (This Name is Ironic) in a polar orbit over them. According to the space war nerds from Haven, a polar orbit would allow the two Haven ships to keep an eye on every part of the corporate fleets and blow anyone up who tried anything funny – like, say, making a break for Earth. Which was exactly what Sarah wanted. She drummed her fingers on the metal armrest of her chair and took in the view the bridge was throwing up.

        The entire Haven fleet – sans the ships they had lost – was decelerating towards Earth. They had enough agrav impellers and inertial controllers to make this deceleration a whole hell of a lot less showy. But they weren’t using them. Instead, they were using conventional fusion thrust, which kicked out massive plumes of glowing, super-heated exhaust. Those thrust plumes would sketch themselves across the night sky of Earth – like the fingers of an immense, neon demon. They would be an announcement that the jamming systems couldn’t block out.

        Sarah licked her lips. “All right,” she said, ducking her chin forward as she focused and threw her words out throughout the fleet. “Anyone have some final change of plans they want to suggest.”

        “Yup,” a voice she half-recognized came on. It was one of the Syndicalists, she was pretty sure. “The jamming means we can’t get any signals through to the people down there – but we could use some of the auxiliary ships to cut messages into the sky using thrust plumes! I’ve got the flight plans laid in, we can use drone ships so no one has to actually fly them.”

        “What will the message be?” Rose asked.

        “Uh...we come in peace, death to capitalism?”

        “No, that’s terrible!” Annie said. “Death to capitalism should come first.”

        The debate started to pick up heat. Sarah grinned – and was glad of the distraction.         

        In the end, the message that the Haven fleet voted on – with a bare majority – was: We come in peace. Our only enemies are the CEOs. Sarah wasn’t sure how comforting it would be to the population of Earth. But she figured it was better than nothing. And, well. Life was about to get extremely scary for them. She waited for the last few seconds of the braking maneuvers that would bring them into a geostationary orbit above the Cayman Crescent. Four centuries before, the Crescent had been where the founders of the modern world had traded their money, far from the greedy, grasping claws of the vicious nation-states of the time. Or, at least, that was the history that Sarah had been taught. For all she knew, it was just a lie – like so much of the rest of the history she knew. They had started as islands, but as the nation-states fell and the corporate power structures that had dominated human space for nearly four hundred years took over, the islands had been built up, expanded, interconnected and transformed into a vast, floating arcology that was used to differentiate the haves from the have nots.

        A corporation wasn’t really ranked as one of the top dogs, the real winners, until its CEO was able to afford the stratospheric prices for one of the penthouses on the Crescent. This meant that the former chain of islands, nestled in the gulf between the American Archipelagos and the South Georgian coastline, was also one of the most heavily defended places in the entirety of human space. The defense grid was maintained by several hideously expensive satellites, an immense number of surface-to-space missile platforms, particle beams, kinetic weapons, and chaff drone launchers, and an entire army of corporate security goons.

        “Why are you doing this?”

        Sarah nearly sprang out of her own chair, her nervous tension high enough that she could have cut it with a knife. She snapped her head around and saw Zeradar standing beside her – the uncanny Pro-Tas ability to blend into the background until they wanted to speak or be noticed once again biting her in the butt. Sarah sagged back into the seat. “We have too, Zeradar,” she said, her voice soft.

        “To make war on your own species, while the Claw rampages across the galaxy still? It strikes me as rank foolishness,” Zeradar said, his translation orb whirring softly as it rotated around and around his head.

        “We’re not making war on humanity,” Aiden’s voice broke into the room. Sarah sprang to her feet as her lover walked onto the bridge, stretching himself as he did so. “Just CEOs.”

        Sarah snuggled up against Aiden. One last hug before the next bit. She whispered in his ear. “Off the books? I’m terrified of fucking this up.”

        Aiden squeezed her butt. “Hey, you haven’t screwed up so far.”

        “Well, that’s not true-” Sarah started.

        The instant she started that sentence, the defense grid around Earth opened up on the Haven fleet and the Haven fleet opened up on the defense grid. The Haveners had been prepared for what the corporate grid would throw at them – and the first few parries and counter-attacks that filled space went exactly as planned. Thermonuclear and antimatter weapons were swatted out of the sky by directed blasts of energy, and ablative armor took the brunt of particle beams and lasers. Precision railgun shots from the orbiting ships fell upon the emitters and the beam turrets, while beams swept satellites out of existence.

        And then the spores began to fall.

        Sarah closed her eyes and let her awareness sweep outwards. She was no longer focused on her own body. Instead, she felt the creatures that they had bred on Haven, waking fully to their new task. Each landing spore had been culled from the race-memory of the Claw, pulled out and used to her own ends. They were large, ablative chunks of bio-organic armor, wrapped around a cluster of organic units. Said units were, in the first wave, primarily a mixture of her favorites, the bladelings, and the shield emitting crabs that Sarah had named, despite all protests to the contrary, krabfriends.

        The krabfriends wreathed each spore in a glowing shell of gravitic energy, turning aside the anti-aircraft fire that tried to smash the landing spore out of the air as they streaked down towards the glittering, hyper-wealthy arcology. Tracers filled the air, brilliant orange lines of weapons fire cutting across the night, bending away like rivers of light being displaced by boulders. Some of the gravitic shields collapsed under the onslaught and the spores broke apart in the air, spilling their creatures into the plastic choked surf and boiling waters of Earth.

        Most of them struck.

        When a landing spore struck, it absorbed the impact into its own body, causing it to bust like a fruit. This had the side effect of sweeping the bladelings out into the air, so that the sleek, armor plated murder-dogs were sent tumbling. Sarah felt their tiny, murderous brains squealing with delight as they skittered across the smooth, silvery surface of the shuttlebays, rooftops, and garden atriums that they landed in. Some smashed through glass. Others upended elegant tables that had been, until very recently, occupied by the wealthy vacationers that made up the majority of the Crescent’s population.

        Almost a hundred thousand bladelings landed at about the same instant, the tiny sparks of their awareness filling Sarah’s mind with a full, three dimensional view of the arcology. She saw people running desperately for cover – and she saw the armored goons of Crescent Security sprinting towards the landing sites. They were dressed in gold filigree, with tall shako hats like they had stepped off the battlefields of...World War...One? Sarah was a bit fuzzy on ancient uniforms. But whatever they wore, they were armed with sleek and futuristic looking energy weapons.

        Sarah focused and activated the modification she had given to the bladelings.

        “C-Sec officers!” she spoke through the bladelings, her voice booming from sleek voice-organs mounted on their backs. “I am Sarah Kappel. I’m not here to fight you. We are not here to fight you. We are your brothers, your sisters – we’ve all been screwed for so long, and we say no more. Step aside, and we’ll-”

        The C-Sec soldiers opened fire.

        Sarah winced as she felt her bladelings collapsing under the spray of high energy beams. Armor plating shattered and the black blood of her creatures hissed into the air in the form of superheated steam, condensing against the walls and corridors of the Crescent.

        “All right, then,” she whispered.

        The second wave landed – more spores splitting open. More bladelings tumbled free. But so did spitters and krabfriends. She immediately organized them unit squads – her eyes closed tight as she snapped her attention from cluster to cluster to cluster. The C-sec goons weren’t exactly fighting as a unified force: They just opened up on anything and everything they saw, blazing through their power cells at the first sign of trouble. Sarah flexed her fingers – and her krabfriends focused their gravitic shields. While they couldn’t redirect energy weapons, they could fill the air with dust particulates and chunks of debris, whirling them around in random patterns, then blowing them outwards in waves of gravitic force.

        Smoke and debris filled section after section of the Crescent. And from the smoke came the black forms of monsters.

        Sarah stood, her eyes opening. “Stage one is down...” She murmured. “Ready for Stage Two, Aiden?”

        Aiden grinned and extended his claws.

***

        There was a tiny problem with C-sec’s command structure. Technically, they owed their fealty to Crescent Security, a subsidiary of the Crescent Corporation. But the problem was that Crescent Corporation was, itself, partially owned by every major corporation on the planet. This had worked fine, when all they needed to agree on was how high to build their towers and how much art deco to use to decorate the interior. Now, the decisions were getting a little more fraught.

        Jeff-3, the alpha level intelligence patterned after the cloned mind of Jeff Bezos, was already packing his suitcase.

        “We have to stay here and we’ll be fine,” Waltamina Disney-Eisner Takashi Watts McLeod said, chewing his thumbnail to the quick. “This is the CEO bunker!  The  CEO bunker. It’s got solid neutronium jacketed walls and gravity shields and-”

        “The best time to be in the middle of a warzone, Walty, is  never,”  Jeff-3 said.

        “But if we go outside, we won’t be safe!” Walty wailed.

        Jeff-3 was beginning to regret his decision to pool his funds with Walty. The construction of a CEO bunker had seemed like a distant, minor concern at the time, and so when Walty had suggested they combine their funds and spend them together – reducing the cost significantly – he had gone with it. But Walty, a frail, stick thin man who was only kept alive by a fine haze of nanotechnology and the organs of several dozen different Peruvian teenagers harvested over a long, cocaine fueled weekend, had gone from confident to terrified in about fifteen nanoseconds, the instant the C-sec transmission had come through.

         Sorry, Sir. The bid on our contract has been upped, we’re relocating to NovaDyne’s tower. Good luck.

         That had been the only thing said, the only response to nearly ten years of a 10% security contribution. Jeff-3’s internal routines designed to mimic the emotion his original clone had interpreted as rage went into overdrive. They had blown him off, as if he hadn’t had enough money to buy their fucking souls ten billion times over. And so, he had made up his mind: He was going to leave. He had a shuttle, he could escape, and he could watch the fireworks from a distance. Maybe , he thought, C-sec, the incompetent lackwits, would fuck things up so much that I’ll get a chance to drop an antimatter warhead on the whole Crescent. That would be a fitting revenge. Sorry, you’ve been outbid indeed!

         “Wait, Jeffy, wait!” Walty hurried forward, his body whirring and clicking. He moved around to stand before the door leading into and out of the bunker. “Wait. I’ll sell you Pixar, just do not open the door.”

        “Waltamina,” Jeff-3 said, reaching out to caress the terrified man’s cheek. “C-Sec is currently withdrawing to NoveDyne tower. Do you know what that means?”

        “No?” Walty whimpered.

        “It means that the invading xenos will go after them first,” Jeff-3 said, as if he was explaining how the sun worked to a very young child. “They’re after people who fight back. Why would they ever come to our little hideaway?”

        “R-Really?” Walty asked.

        “So, just get out of the way...and we can go to the shuttle...and then you can sell me Pixar,” Jeff-3 said, his synthetic lips peeling back into a grin.

        “What!?” Walty yelped.

        “It’s my shuttle, Disney,” Jeff-3 said, stepping past the quivering man and tapping his access code into the door – which began to rumble. The gravitic shields that kept the solid neutronium that provided the bunker’s armoring from crashing through the floor, the arcology, the crust, the mantle, the core, and out the other side of the planet Earth shifted and whirred, pushing the door open. It looked as if the wall itself had decided to move, flowing smoothly open, revealing the narrow corridor that led straight into Jeff-3’s boardroom. Jeff-3 stepped out, adjusting his suit.

        And he found himself looking at a mass of chitinous horrors. Mouths drooling with greenish slime, eyes gleaming with brilliant, yellow intent. And sitting among the lot of them was a skinny girl – her skin a dark green-gray, her head covered in smallish spines. She was naked. And she was eating one of his apples.

        “Sup, Bezos,” she said. “my name’s Annie. I’m an anarchist. And you, buddy, done royally fucked up.”

***

        The spore carrying Sarah was not the first spore carrying a Commander onto the surface of the Earth. Others were dropping in the Crescent, and others were dropping in strategically important areas that Sarah and the Haven team had picked out on the way to Earth. But Sarah couldn’t think about plans and schemes for a few moments: The impact of the spore and the crash of it opening up and sending her flying through the air was everything she could think about. She tumbled, she sprawled, she skidded, and she came to a rest underneath an art deco statue of a naked angel.

        “Whee...” She said, pushing herself slowly to her hands and knees. Aiden landed beside her, on his feet, like a cat.

        “That was fun!” he said, then laughed as several bladelings scampered over to nose Sarah to her feet. She petted the two sleek creatures, laughing with Aiden. His laughter faded and the grin that replaced it was fierce. Feral. Sarah took a moment to take in the Crescent herself, through her own eyes, her own senses. The arcology still looked like delicate, ornate perfection incarnate. The walls and the floor were all done in silver metal, with golden statuary and red carpeting and garden planter situated everywhere. The air smelled of perfume and fresh salt spray, added in by the air filtration systems – which were working hard to filter out the smoke, the dust, and the blood.

         Heyyy Sarah! Annie’s voice came into her head. I’ve nabbed two CEOs and I’m shaking their money out of their pockets while cackling.

        This is Sexy, Sexy Napoleon chimed in. Me and Kellen have landed in Russia – we’re beginning to set up our bases.

        Tex here, Tex thought to her. I’ve landed on the Lunar bases – we’ll stop getting the kinetic impactors flung at the fleet.

         Sarah nodded. Excellent. She cracked her knuckles, then started to walk towards the sound of the heaviest fighting.

        The NovaDyne tower was the place. It rose out of the wild jungle of lower level – and lower class – rooms like a silver tree. The bladelings and the spitters and the krabfriends had fought their way to the middle sections of the tower and then been stopped. There, C-Sec had deployed makers and automated drones in a concentration thick enough that her creatures couldn’t bust through without being reduced to a fine paste. The landing spores had petered off, and they didn’t have a base to bring new units online – so they had held back. That was the scene that Sarah found when she and Aiden came to the frontlines.

        The corridor they entered had two krabfriends crouched in the middle of it, projecting their protective bubbles outwards, visible as faint distortions in the air. Bullets thudded into them and then dropped to the floor every few seconds, fired by heavy auto-cannons set up on the far end of the corridor. Past the barricades, Sarah could almost smell the fear on the C-sec goons. She had counted the human bodies – and saw at least twelve on her way there. She felt her own excitement for the battle dampen slightly – then flared brighter as she clenched her hands.

        “They could have surrendered,” she whispered. “How many of them are just fighting to keep their fucking dental plans?”

        Aiden shook his head. “So, what’s your plan now?”

        Sarah grinned. She stepped past the krabfriends, her body moving through the gravitic shields with only a faint moment of disorientation, as if her inner ear was being given a tumble while her eyes said she was walking straight forward.

        She wondered how she looked to the security guards. She felt the killer instinct in her – the instinct that had been patterned into her by Evil itself. It had first awoken when she had woken up from her initial transformation and clawed out an animal's throat with her claws. She had felt the same urge again and again and again. But she had her fingers around the reigns of the instinct. She was able to hold it back as the men behind the barricade paused in their suppressive fire – and then opened up with every weapon they had. But Sarah had already charged forward, moving at lightning quick speed. She ducked low underneath the bullets and the beams, then slashed open the barricade. Metal flew and she sprang through the hole, landing among the terrified guards.

        And there, she released her pheromones.

        The weapons fire stopped as the C-Sec goons gaped at her, their eyes widening slightly behind their targeting monocles. Their weapons hung limp in their hands as Sarah murmured. “I’m not here to hurt you – none of us are. We don’t want to kill anyone.” She said, nodding. Gingerly, she reached out and undid the clasp on the helmet of one of the C-sec guards. The shako fell off the woman’s head, revealing her ebony black features, her full lips parting in silent shock.

        “It’s okay,” Sarah whispered.

        The black woman leaned in and kissed her. She moaned into Sarah’s mouth – and Sarah was glad she had remembered to shut off the contact neurotoxin she normally sweated. Another C-sec guard stepped up behind her, his armor already sliding off. Sarah drew her mouth back, her hands gripping onto the chest piece of the C-sec guard before her. She tugged it forward with a little grind and admired the full swell of the woman’s breasts. Other guards were stripping, and Sarah had to force herself to step back and away.

        Within a few moments, the corridor chokepoint had transformed into an orgy. The guards were kissing and moaning and caressing one another – most of them too desperate to fully strip. The cries of battle had been replaced with the cries of pleasure. Sarah sighed, slightly, her arms sliding along her chest as Aiden picked his way past the happy pile of eager, thrusting men and women. He grinned at her.

        “Isn’t that a little mind control-ey?” He asked.

        “I just lowered inhibitions and raised arousal,” Sarah said, blushing.

        “...isn’t that a little mind control-ey?” Aiden asked.

        “Shut up Aiden,” she said, sticking her tongue out at him. “It’s better to start a cum bath than a blood bath. Right?”

        “Right,” Aiden said. “Definitely not because you’re a pervert.”

        “Shut up.”

        They passed three more checkpoints. Each time, either Aiden or Sarah slipped past or bashed through their defenses and filled the air with pheromones. They moved fast enough that C-sec didn’t have time to get out their NBC kits. As they moved, they kept getting reports: Several Commanders had been training in the Russian sprawl, and were fighting a running tank battle against Napoleon and Kellen’s swarms. The biologists that had landed in the strategic areas were finding their work was progressing at an exponential rate. While they had no real signs to show for what they had done so far, they promised that within a week, no one would be able to deny what they were doing.

        They came, at last, to the final line of defense.

        Four men and a woman in C-sec armor, their weapons aimed down the range, standing before a massive doorway made of solid neutronium and jacketed in gravitational fields. They looked like each and every single one of them were regretting what they had signed up for. Sarah stood at the end of the corridor, admiring the untouched gilt and finery that decorated the walls, readying herself for one last sprint. Then the woman dropped her gun. “Oh no,” she said. “My body is being overcome with...terror.” She looked at the others. “We all had to flee.”

        “My god. She’s right!” One of the men said, throwing his rifle down.

        “They’re not paying me enough for this shit.” A third stood from his crouch. “Who wants to loot the liquor cabinet?”

        “Fuckin A!”

        The whole group walked past Sarah, nodding to her hesitantly as she watched them go. Aiden grinned. “Be sure to take a shot for me!” He called after them.

        “Well,” Sarah said. “That was easy!”

She walked up to the door. She closed her eyes, focusing on the paracasual powers in her body. Her fingers flared outwards and she felt the weight of the doorway. But she wasn’t seeking to move the doorway herself. Instead, she found the buried codes of the keypads that controlled the door itself. She shifted about the many possible realms where she might live within and found the one where she correctly guessed the passcode, then opened her eyes. Her head buzzed with the effort of her paracasual outreach, then tapped in the buttons.

        The door smoothly opened with a hiss and a squeal, revealing the interior of a CEO command bunker. It was as opulent as she had expected, with a food maker tucked into the corner, a collection of autonomous robots, gamma level intelligences she was sure, standing in the corner. They were all gynoids in maid outfits. Frilly, skimpy maid outfits. There was a large mahogany desk, and behind it sat her CEO, the head of NovaDyne itself.

        Jason Wheeler was not the most assuming man that Sarah had ever seen. And, in the grand scheme of the wealthy, he was actually purely middle of the road. He wasn’t as rich as Jeff-3 or Disney. But he still looked as if he was in charge. His skin was pale as milk and his hair was sleet gray and his face was seamed with lines and his lips were twisted up into a wry, mocking smile.

        “I would stop there, if I were you,” he said, his hand caressing an oblong, football shaped contraption on his desk. His finger paused over a large, red button. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

        “No...what?” Sarah said, frowning. She hadn’t heard anything about this when she had discussed the plan - and she had asked Hailee about ever defense that she knew as a beta-level intelligence.

        She didn’t like being surprised like this. Not one bit .

        “Normally, it’s supposed to be held by the wealthiest CEO – the one who has proven themselves most apt to make the hard calls. But your attack came so fast that I had to take it upon myself to secure it. It’s keyed to each of our genetic codes,” Wheeler said, his voice grim. “In case of a catastrophic labor code violation, this is our trump card. The final protection, the bulwark against the most terrible fate that could befall this lovely, gray-brown planet. The end of capitalism.” He lifted his chin. “Capitalism is what made us great, monster. I will not see it be destroyed by a bunch of selfish whiners desperate for a free lunch.”

        Sarah crossed her arms over her breasts. She smirked. “What does it do?”

        “It activates the Enclosure Protocol,” Wheeler said. “Every single AI core has been chained to the direct oversight of the corporate board and the United Nations – it is for our own protection. This oversight means that we can access the AI core of every single system, every single maker on the Earth and the colonies, save for those on Crescent. If I push this button, every maker will begin to mass produce Kalton gas. It’s been designed to spread rapidly, silently, colorlessly. It eats through every filter on the market and has a one hundred percent mortality rate.”

        Sarah slowly gaped at him. “You’d kill billions of people-”

        “To protect the future of the human race from creatures like you?” Wheeler smirked. “Absolutely.”

        He lifted his chin and drew a slow breath. “Once the gas has been deployed and rendered inert by time, the genetic stock on the Crescent islands can rebuild. It will take time. It will be hard . But we have the technology to recreate this world – to once more establish markets, trade, mercantilism! We have that determination , determination that you spineless communists lack . Now. Will you surrender...or will I push this big. Red. Button?”

        Sarah glanced at Aiden. He nodded to her. She glanced back at Wheeler.

        She sucked in some air, bulging out her cheeks, then let the air ‘pffftbt’ past her lips. She considered her plan. Considered her future. Considered what she should do.

        Fortunately, what to do was easy.

        “Ehhhhhhhh,” Sarah said, spreading her hands wide. “Humanity had a nice run.”

        She took two steps forward, grabbed onto Wheeler’s hand, then forced him to press the big red button.