Over Reaching (part 18)
Mr Zoat
Dedicated ragequitter
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3rd July 2012
11:11 GMT -5
Empathic vision shows me the positions of the Darkstars who follow me into the… I don't like calling it an 'embassy'. It isn't one. It's the centre of government for everything the Reach care to control directly, while maintaining a paper thin disguise that the opinion of the local 'rulers' matters at all. But there isn't another word for that. 'Assimilatorium' just sounds ridiculous.
I see locals cowering out of the way as I walk, but all of the blood I see is the right colour for it to have come from the garrison of Reach soldiers. I imagine that the Darkstars are rather enjoying the turnabout from the old way of things, when a garrison was difficult and a Scarab meant death, and I approve of the lack of collateral damage.
"Anyone home?! There's.. really nothing to be gained by hiding at this point!"
"So it would seem."
The Reach Assimilation Specialist in charge walks slowly into view, hands down and clearly visible. Some Assimilation Specialists get augmentations or scarabs, but my scans don't show anything like that here. This one is female, and the robes she wears are grey and green.
"Ah! Hello, Assimilation Specialist. I am the Illustres of the Orange Lantern Corps and I'm here to accept your surrender."
"I think that you are unduly optimistic."
"Probably, but I have to ask. It doesn't look good if we just go around slaughtering people who aren't actively resisting, and we need the popular support."
"And what would you do with me if I surrendered?"
I smile. "I'd put your face on the evening news on a thousand worlds. In practical terms it makes very little difference as… Well, we've won here."
"Are you certain?"
"Certain? No. If living on Earth has taught me anything, nothing is certain. That thing three generations of my species thought was a small planet turned out to be a giant frozen starfish." I shrug. "But as sure as I can reasonably be."
"You say that you are concerned with how this looks to a wider audience. Would-?"
"Look, I've listened to a lot of villainous monologues. Could you please skip to the actionable part of the threat?"
There's a slight hardening in her expression.
"Very well. I'm holding the entire infant population of this planet hostage. If I die, they all die. If I decide to kill them, they all die."
Hm.
"Alright, and that would look bad, but it doesn't change the strategic situation. Do you intend to negotiate for something, or do you just want me to know before you kill them? Because I have to warn you, I'm not a Green Lantern. I don't care all that much about the suffering of people I don't know."
"No one in the Reach government will consider me responsible for your people winning a few fleet engagements. But the people of this world will remain loyal to the Reach for as long as my hand remains to the activation switch."
I try a more detailed scan, and she smiles as she sees my eyes go orange.
"It's not literally a simple button. We have been aware that this war was coming for some time. There are a dozen sophisticated channels of communication linking me to the activation switch, and any interference at all will activate the system. A normal Lantern could stop perhaps two. A Lantern who specialised in data analysis like your Coluan or that space station AI might get as many as half."
"So… You expect us to let you stay here."
"In my estimation, there's a sixty percent chance that you will. Without a fleet here this planet isn't an active threat, and you haven't planned this war with the assumption that you'll be able to resupply locally. The adverse publicity wouldn't be a major blow, but it would be worse than ignoring me."
"And the other forty?"
"Thirty nine that you'll try and disarm it and fail. One percent that you'll kill me out of spite."
"None that we'll successfully disarm it?"
"No. We're rather good at death traps."
"Alright, well, be that as it may, I'm going to need to confirm the existence of this trap. I assume we can look at it without setting it off?"
"Certainly. The locals do like to visit their gestating offspring." She smiles, and Reach citizens… Don't have a good face for smiling. I'm not sure if it's the nose or the reduced mobility or the blatantly sinister intent… Not a good look. "Come with me."
I bow sarcastically as she walks past me, then follow her towards the normal entrance of the building. She waves at the somewhat intact console and the shutter covering the building tries to retract. It fails, the building's internal power network too badly damaged to make it do more than shudder. She stops then turns her head towards me.
"Would you mind?"
Treating a high ranked enemy as if they were a servant. This is going to be petty and annoying and if I wasn't fairly sure that I was going to win anyway I might walk back to the blasted hole out of spite.
I can detect some of the communication carriers. Intent as well as more normal forms of mundane and exotic transmission. Not a dozen, but they're sophisticated enough that I'm happy to accept the idea that there could well be others I'm not seeing. I can't tell from a cursory examination whether or not I could fake them to a sufficient standard to satisfy the dead man's switch system.
But.
There are still plenty of ways to prevent her dead man's switch going off. Sticking her in a medical coma and leaving her there while a telepath manipulates her thoughts into the 'right' shape would probably work, because a 'perfect' system is still depending on a perfectly flawed trigger condition. But killing a large number of people at exactly the same time will require a device to do the actual killing, and blocking that sounds a heck of a lot easier than trying to interfere with the detection end of the system.
"Of course not."
I slam a construct crumbler gauntlet into the shutter and it decays to dust.
"There you are."
Ring, transmit to the Darkstars.
Compliance.
Any truth to what she's saying?
Rather than a verbal response, someone on the team sends me a data file.
The locals… Reproduce in a way which uses eggs as a stage. More like fish eggs than bird eggs, the requirement for an aquatic environment and protection means that each city has a structure dedicated to housing them while they develop. When the Reach took the planet they took control of the incubators and booby trapped them. No problem with putting your egg in and taking it out seven months later as long as the planet stays loyal, but it means that every single family has a hostage while their egg is in there.
And naturally the Reach has been watching closely to make sure that everyone uses their incubators and no one is building any outside of their control. Still not totally sure why that was their only point of control; the Reach are usually really subtle in the early stages, and with direct access to their eggs I'd have expected them to go in there with the neural pruning.
I'll have to wait until we arrive to get a closer look.
11:11 GMT -5
Empathic vision shows me the positions of the Darkstars who follow me into the… I don't like calling it an 'embassy'. It isn't one. It's the centre of government for everything the Reach care to control directly, while maintaining a paper thin disguise that the opinion of the local 'rulers' matters at all. But there isn't another word for that. 'Assimilatorium' just sounds ridiculous.
I see locals cowering out of the way as I walk, but all of the blood I see is the right colour for it to have come from the garrison of Reach soldiers. I imagine that the Darkstars are rather enjoying the turnabout from the old way of things, when a garrison was difficult and a Scarab meant death, and I approve of the lack of collateral damage.
"Anyone home?! There's.. really nothing to be gained by hiding at this point!"
"So it would seem."
The Reach Assimilation Specialist in charge walks slowly into view, hands down and clearly visible. Some Assimilation Specialists get augmentations or scarabs, but my scans don't show anything like that here. This one is female, and the robes she wears are grey and green.
"Ah! Hello, Assimilation Specialist. I am the Illustres of the Orange Lantern Corps and I'm here to accept your surrender."
"I think that you are unduly optimistic."
"Probably, but I have to ask. It doesn't look good if we just go around slaughtering people who aren't actively resisting, and we need the popular support."
"And what would you do with me if I surrendered?"
I smile. "I'd put your face on the evening news on a thousand worlds. In practical terms it makes very little difference as… Well, we've won here."
"Are you certain?"
"Certain? No. If living on Earth has taught me anything, nothing is certain. That thing three generations of my species thought was a small planet turned out to be a giant frozen starfish." I shrug. "But as sure as I can reasonably be."
"You say that you are concerned with how this looks to a wider audience. Would-?"
"Look, I've listened to a lot of villainous monologues. Could you please skip to the actionable part of the threat?"
There's a slight hardening in her expression.
"Very well. I'm holding the entire infant population of this planet hostage. If I die, they all die. If I decide to kill them, they all die."
Hm.
"Alright, and that would look bad, but it doesn't change the strategic situation. Do you intend to negotiate for something, or do you just want me to know before you kill them? Because I have to warn you, I'm not a Green Lantern. I don't care all that much about the suffering of people I don't know."
"No one in the Reach government will consider me responsible for your people winning a few fleet engagements. But the people of this world will remain loyal to the Reach for as long as my hand remains to the activation switch."
I try a more detailed scan, and she smiles as she sees my eyes go orange.
"It's not literally a simple button. We have been aware that this war was coming for some time. There are a dozen sophisticated channels of communication linking me to the activation switch, and any interference at all will activate the system. A normal Lantern could stop perhaps two. A Lantern who specialised in data analysis like your Coluan or that space station AI might get as many as half."
"So… You expect us to let you stay here."
"In my estimation, there's a sixty percent chance that you will. Without a fleet here this planet isn't an active threat, and you haven't planned this war with the assumption that you'll be able to resupply locally. The adverse publicity wouldn't be a major blow, but it would be worse than ignoring me."
"And the other forty?"
"Thirty nine that you'll try and disarm it and fail. One percent that you'll kill me out of spite."
"None that we'll successfully disarm it?"
"No. We're rather good at death traps."
"Alright, well, be that as it may, I'm going to need to confirm the existence of this trap. I assume we can look at it without setting it off?"
"Certainly. The locals do like to visit their gestating offspring." She smiles, and Reach citizens… Don't have a good face for smiling. I'm not sure if it's the nose or the reduced mobility or the blatantly sinister intent… Not a good look. "Come with me."
I bow sarcastically as she walks past me, then follow her towards the normal entrance of the building. She waves at the somewhat intact console and the shutter covering the building tries to retract. It fails, the building's internal power network too badly damaged to make it do more than shudder. She stops then turns her head towards me.
"Would you mind?"
Treating a high ranked enemy as if they were a servant. This is going to be petty and annoying and if I wasn't fairly sure that I was going to win anyway I might walk back to the blasted hole out of spite.
I can detect some of the communication carriers. Intent as well as more normal forms of mundane and exotic transmission. Not a dozen, but they're sophisticated enough that I'm happy to accept the idea that there could well be others I'm not seeing. I can't tell from a cursory examination whether or not I could fake them to a sufficient standard to satisfy the dead man's switch system.
But.
There are still plenty of ways to prevent her dead man's switch going off. Sticking her in a medical coma and leaving her there while a telepath manipulates her thoughts into the 'right' shape would probably work, because a 'perfect' system is still depending on a perfectly flawed trigger condition. But killing a large number of people at exactly the same time will require a device to do the actual killing, and blocking that sounds a heck of a lot easier than trying to interfere with the detection end of the system.
"Of course not."
I slam a construct crumbler gauntlet into the shutter and it decays to dust.
"There you are."
Ring, transmit to the Darkstars.
Compliance.
Any truth to what she's saying?
Rather than a verbal response, someone on the team sends me a data file.
The locals… Reproduce in a way which uses eggs as a stage. More like fish eggs than bird eggs, the requirement for an aquatic environment and protection means that each city has a structure dedicated to housing them while they develop. When the Reach took the planet they took control of the incubators and booby trapped them. No problem with putting your egg in and taking it out seven months later as long as the planet stays loyal, but it means that every single family has a hostage while their egg is in there.
And naturally the Reach has been watching closely to make sure that everyone uses their incubators and no one is building any outside of their control. Still not totally sure why that was their only point of control; the Reach are usually really subtle in the early stages, and with direct access to their eggs I'd have expected them to go in there with the neural pruning.
I'll have to wait until we arrive to get a closer look.
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Okay, that is not the attitude of someone in the weaker position here. What's she got that makes her think she's not at risk here?
