Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 23: Offensive Statement

Chapter 23: Offensive Statement

-VERTEX FOUR: 8.36679-

TSAB Headquarters

Interdimensional Space

Five words sent the entire Time Space Administration Bureau into high alert.

It was mostly unheard of for all levels of an organization as large and widespread as the TSAB to consolidate all of its branches, but those five words and the manner in which they were delivered, on top of everything else going wrong... the top brass wouldn't admit it, but they were terrified. Standard dimensional disturbances were bad enough; with the return of one of the deadliest Lost Logia in existence, the unauthorized firing of an Arc-en-Ciel on a planet capable of supporting life, and the inexplicable disappearance of a state-of-the-art L-Class flagship with all hands including two of the Three Aces, all within the same 48-hour span... those five words were enough to put the entire Bureau, from the Legendary Admirals down to the non-commissioned deckhands, on a crisis footing.

The five words themselves were simple: "Evacuate. Dead End is coming."

What was cause for alarm was that those words appeared simultaneously on thousands of worlds, on every communication system and frequency the TSAB had, even the most private encrypted channels. The sender was anonymous, the point of origin so thoroughly scrambled that it would take decades to decipher, the message delivered via a massive, coordinated burst that bypassed all existing security measures and ensured that the Bureau couldn't help but sit up and take notice. Even hundreds of history's most gifted hackers working together couldn't manage a feat like that.

All for just five words: "Evacuate. Dead End is coming."

Calls to defend the heart of the TSAB went out far and wide, to officers on ships of every kind, stationed in every dimension the Bureau had jurisdiction over. And the fleets answered: vessels of all classes now hovered around the station, at least ten ships for each of the six primary spires of the massive alloy structure that hung suspended in interdimensional space. Looking at it now from the outside, Headquarters resembled a model of an atom scaled to enormous size, with the countless ships its orbiting molecules: swarms of tiny single-pilot fighters covered the blind spots of thirteen enormous R-Class dreadnoughts, each half a kilometer long save for the largest and heaviest, the behemoth flagships Takuri, Kunisue, and Eltreum, which dwarfed the others at four kilos from bow to stern. There were well over two dozen L-Class cruisers, the missing Arthra's type, the most versatile the TSAB had. Half were jury-rigged with hastily-constructed Arc-En-Ciel cannons, just to be safe. Supporting them were scores of frigates bristling with advanced weaponry, quick and nimble recon flyers in tight formations, multitudes of autonomous repair ships guided by AI and equipped with hundreds of spindly arms ending in a variety of tools, floating artillery platforms and defense shield generators... and on the outer edges of Headquarters territory, a vast, networked proximity mine field, composed of several thousand chrome spheres in a spherical grid pattern. The Dimensional Navy was out in full force.

The higher-ranking officers of the Ground Forces on Cranagan scoffed at this entire operation, as was typical of them. Lt. General Regius Gaiz, in particular, railed publicly at the thought of expending so much manpower and so many resources over one cryptic message with an unknown source. Many Ground Forces personnel agreed with him, though unlike Gaiz, they prefered to keep their opinions off the public record.

Response from the Navy's commanding officers was swift. It came not in the form of arguments via comms or formal rebuttals, but in the form of the last automatic logs transmitted by the Arthra before the total disappearance of the ship and her crew. These logs struck cold fear into the hearts of everyone who saw them, even Gaiz, who silenced his complaints immediately.