Forevermore Unto the Void

The Andromeda War (part 2: War)

1

Five Minutes to Midnight

Archimedes hesitated for a few, brief moments at his console, part of him not wanting to start what he would by issuing the command, but the rest of him knowing that, because of how he had won the War for Aetherius, he really had no choice in the matter. Wrestling against his own mind, Archimedes' decision eventually didn't even come from him. As he stared at the screen, at the series of commands that would plunge the Argus Collective into civil war, Archimedes felt something cold as ice trickle down the back of his spine, slowly working its way into his hand. For the briefest of moments before his right finger twitched under the psychic pressure, Archimedes was almost certain that he saw the translucent image of a gauntleted hand above his own. By the time the image was gone from his mind, Archimedes knew that it was far too late: the command had been sent.

Standing from his desk, Archimedes nodded emptily to himself and began pouring a drink from the crystal decanter on the shelf near his desk. After emptying the cup next to the decanter a few times, Archimedes sat back down at his desk and began setting the other dominoes into motion.

Across the Verx system, sentinels that had previously been going mad and tearing themselves to pieces due to errors across the code that seemingly came from nowhere suddenly stopped, allowing the armies of programmers to take a break and look at their work with a degree of pride. Their success, however, was short lived when the legions of sentinels across Verx, not only the recent models that had been going berserk, but even the oldest of models that had functioned perfectly for decades if not centuries suddenly stopped working. The collapse was subtle at first, some of the machines simply pausing where they were throughout the Verx system to peer up at the sky as though transfixed with a primal and human need to stargaze.

As the legions of programmers went back to their consoles across the Milky Way, the heretofore placid sentinels suddenly fell apart in a maelstrom of anarchic violence, tearing apart any and all who went near them, resulting in a handful of deaths and thousands of injuries before the first assault teams were sent to pacify the sentinels. It was then, though, that the code showed its true nature, causing the sentinels to detonate their own power cores just to wreak more casualties among the human teams sent to break them.

By the time the sentinels on Verx had been completely pacified, none of the Milky Way residents dared trust their machines-Archimedes' damage had already been done. Across the galaxy, people were giving useful machines to scrap yards out of paranoia and whole divisions of the standing military were decommissioned on the spot due to the failure of a handful of machines.

During the months it took to clean up the affairs with the sentinels, none of the residents of the Milky Way realised that all of Andromeda had gone dark, neither sending nor receiving communications of any kind. By the time the communications had come back, the Milky Way was still reeling in shock from the brutal assault, everyone searching for someone to blame.

While the galaxy reeled from the brutal effects of what Archimedes had done to the sentinels, the next dominoes had already started to fall. The Qaestors that Lethe had sent to investigate Hydra, a handful of officers from the general task force set aside for maintaining order, specifically the branch concerned with financial affairs and cybercrime, found no record of any plutocrat by the name retrieved from the servers. Before they were able to report that to Terra, however, they found the real reason why Archimedes had chosen Hydra as the location for the alias' location.

The moon, having been given nearly earth-like gravity by a combination of a dense iron core set to spin inside the moon and a spinning hab spire set above the surface of the small moon proper, had been designed by a team of engineers spearheaded by Archimedes himself after the War for Aetherius. That very purposeful selection showed its hand now as the charges placed at the places specifically chosen to do the most damage possible detonated at once. Across the spires, space elevators, coriolis rings, and central core monitors, small-scale neutronium charges detonated.