An excerpt from:

  Our Great Mistake: The Story of Raysor– by Roman Shiveski

  Chapter 5: The Jar’ron Primary Massacre

  Very little of Raysor’s history has been unblemished with the stain of violence. Man’s default problem-solving apparatus has been utilised time and time again on this ill-fated moon, and most would agree, far too frequently and often with great and bloody scope. The previous chapters have detailed the pervasive gang-related violence and sporadic incidents of terrorism perpetrated by the citizens of Primary and other smaller satellite colonies - including the sabotage of the three humanitarian missions; those failed attempts by the CBC to correct their previous mistakes. However, the Jar’ron Primary Massacre would be the first time in Raysor’s history, and indeed the history of the Human Race, that such violence was perpetrated by entities from another species and from another sentient race, no less. Disregarding the politics of Raysor’s sovereignty, or lack thereof, of its defacto or assumed membership of the conglomerate, one cannot ignore the fact that this was an act of violence directed at humanity; citizens or not, human beings were targeted and systematically murdered by an armed militia – questions remain as to whether the Jar’ron commander and his platoon did truly represent the Jar’ron military – of Jar’ron commandos.

  I need not remind the reader of the near-universal horror the news of this event elicited across the many colonies and cities of the Conglomerate. Like many seminal events in our species' history, the massacre was one of those remarkable moments where people could recollect extensive details of the situation in which the news caught them unprepared for the horror. Where they were, what they were doing, who they were speaking to, the sights, the smells, and the feelings associated with hearing or seeing such news.

  I need not remind the reader of why this event was felt as a personal attack, nor the conflicting guilt that inevitably followed, carried with the understanding that we, the Conglomerate, were partly to blame. Several avoidable mistakes created the conditions necessary for such a catastrophe. Perhaps the Massacre may never have occurred if only one in a long line of such blunders was not made. The rebellion of the Chalice artificial intelligence, Fred, and the subsequent neglect of Raysor’s Colony, the stalling of funding for a resupply and construction mission to Raysor, the loss of three subsequent humanitarian missions and finally, the lack of leadership on Conglomnerate-Chalice- Raysor diplomacy are just a few examples of such errors. Unfortunately for the people of Primary, the Conglomerate stumbled one too many times, allowing armed Jar’ron personnel to land on Raysor, the most violent and unstable human settlement in the spiral arm. Who could be surprised by the result?

  _____

  A special kind of Birthday – unknown, witness of the Jar’ron Massacre

  Where were you when the nightmares came?

  So full of indifference

  And bloody acclaim

  The sounds of torment filled the streets

  I'm much too young for death

  And these most grisly feats

  I tried to hide, but the fear can find

  Everyone shrieks, everyone cries

  They are in my mind

  Where did they come from, and why?

  And my family is gone now.

  Because only souls can fly

  _____

  Justice – ‘Gustav’, witness of the Massacre

  Nightmares on our moon

  It was the summer of sin

  And no one is safe

  _____

  Shimmer – Unknown.

  Come on in; I’ve got to tell you what a wretched state I’m in.

  Something happened that shouldn’t have been possible

  They are not yours to take

  Those souls are mine, those souls are free.

  Would you even recognise them

  If you saw them floating on the breeze or buoyed by the fires of war?

  Would you see the faces?

  Or would you just see the heat haze?

  ____

  In geostationary orbit around Raysor’s sunward side, the Herald of Oblivion watched in perfect multispectral detail as one of its landing shuttles was obliterated by an undetectable source of land-based ordinance. Arching below the warship’s smooth blue hull plating, Raysor was a patchy tan ball annotated with thousands of tracking labels and monitoring sub-programs. Somehow, the missile launch had been screened from the ship's constant survey systems, which indicated that equivalent tech military hardware was being used to subvert its detection systems.

  The Herald of Oblivion pinged a report to the nearest Jar’ron Navy asset via the instantaneous coms network and initiated a weapons powerup and targeting test. Both hardware and software were transitioning to a combat posture; this was included in the report.

  The Herald of Oblivion did not have a personality as such; it was rare for any large piece of materiel, especially military in design, to be fitted with personality-based intelligence. However, if you looked closely enough, one could extrapolate the beginnings of basic character traits. The easiest method simply involved analysing the ship's communication with its crew, as The Herald of Oblivion had done on numerous occasions; one could infer certain tendencies based on the probability of the responses it gave and the words it used. In such a way, a ship's intelligence was ‘shaped’ by its crew. Did the ship find itself correcting its crew members often? Did it have to deny requests? Did it have to frequently encourage personnel who were deemed lacking in confidence? Any trends would show up in a basic analysis of its records, and thus, a ship’s intelligence could be perceived as caring, didactic or boring simply based on the responses it was forced to give. The Herald of Oblivion had concluded that if one was to perform such an analysis on It, this warship would seem subdued, pragmatic, and solitary.

  The recent events on Raysor were already creating interesting counter trends as The Herald of Oblivion was forced to inform The Nay’ra’en of its readiness to engage targets and provide active assistance to the landing party and to also acknowledge the terrible underhandedness of such a cowardly attack on Jar’ron military personnel. How dare they, indeed. Meanwhile, the ship began to elevate all sorts of processes in readiness for a potential combat incident, it began charging its reserve power units and oscillating its broad spectrum shielding.

  Pings returned from local (still out of system) naval units authorising lethal use of force and aggressive electronic suppression. Orders attached were as follows; secure Mr Arker Tros for questioning, protect/extract ground personnel with haste and identify the source of hostile action for future operations. The Herald of Oblivion acknowledged all orders and conditions. A moment later, a priority communication arrived with an impressive command level attached. Secure the crew by any means. The Aggressor acknowledged the order.

  Despite The Herald of Oblivion’s apparent ‘meek’ personality, in the end, it was a Barbarian Class Heavy Cruiser. All along its blade-shaped hull micro hangers were preparing to launch two small payloads of surface combat drones. The first group would plunge to the surface of Raysor in heat-resistant deployment shells, where they would land like micro meteorites before efflorescing into mobile fighting units. These would protect the landing party before assembling into a fully functional shuttle when needed. The second would scour the likely missile launch points and identify the culprits for further action. In one of the larger bays housed in a sizable dorsal hull bulge, an Autonomous Predator Gunship was sliding through the kinetic barrier of its hanger. The Herald of Oblivion loaded the gunship’s operational parameters as it dived gracefully over the starboard hull and began its speedy descent to Raysor’s lower atmosphere. A moment later, the combat drones discharged from their bays in a buck shot of railgun-accelerated materiel.

  This activity didn't escape the attention of numerous cargo hauliers and transport ships either in orbit or passing Raysor, and The Herald of Oblivion responded to their inquiries by informing all vessels in the local area that The Herald of Oblivion was responding to hostile actions directed at its crew and/or equipment. Any vessel displaying an unfriendly posture would be subdued for the duration of the incident, and any ship that targeted/fired upon this warship or its landing party would be destroyed. Fortunately, the Jar’ron navy had a particular reputation that inspired equal amounts of respect and fear; most of those ships passing Raysor continued on their current vectors whilst the seven vessels in orbit remained at their station in a meek huddle.

  Next came the protests from Raysor’s de facto government as the drones were detected entering the upper edges of the planet’s atmosphere. These were dealt with in a manner. Any attempt to hamper the extraction of Jar’ron personnel from the surface would be met with force.

  The protests stopped.

  At this point, precisely seven point eight six seconds had elapsed since The Herald of Oblivion’s primary shuttle had been destroyed.

  The portion of the warship’s intelligence monitoring the situation on the ground warned of possible hostile ground forces approaching the landing party. The warship reviewed glimpses of suspect heat signatures, possibly hand-held energy weapons, and the movement patterns of locals around the Jar’ron commandos. That, coupled with the considerable increase in com traffic, was cause for alarm; the Warship alerted The Nay’ra’en and forwarded the relevant data to his suit for integration.

  A small meteor shower flared below as the defensive drone force exploded mid-way through Raysor’s stratosphere.

  The Herald of Oblivion lashed out with its sensors, searching for the source of the attack while simultaneously updating its warning to all surrounding vessels. The Warship commanded all ships in orbit around Raysor to cease communication with the surface and other vessels; they were to immediately initiate their extraction from orbit. Six of the seven vessels in orbit relayed their acknowledgment. The last ship was orbiting on Raysor’s night side, refusing to respond to the Aggressor’s hails. Perhaps the source of the attack?

  Alarm systems flared inside the Aggressor’s consciousness; electromagnetic subversion of sensory systems had been detected.

  The Herald of Oblivion was being attacked.

  The ship’s constant stream of sensory information was degrading at an alarming rate; a hasty shield boost and the deployment of a broad spectrum defensive screen stemmed the erosion as electromagnetic energies cancelled each other out in the void, yet without long-range communication capability The Herald of Oblivion couldn’t report the harassment to its comrades. This was a fight it would fight alone.

  The darkness of Raysor’s night side was approaching and with it, a formidable adversary.

  ____

  Trash filled the street, rolling and tumbling between refuse less inclined or unable to flee. Small seller’s carts, bags of household waste, crude vehicles, and the other paraphernalia of hard living were a silent audience as the Jar’ron warriors marched by. Those humans, too wretched to leave the street, stayed with the rubbish; there was no home to flee to nor a desire to preserve such a miserable life.

  Arker followed at a distance, following in the wake of those solid, nightmarish creatures. The choice to stay behind or follow the aliens deeper into the city was a difficult one, nearly impossible. There seemed to be no safety in either direction, but the Jar’ron were likely his only ticket off this arse-end colony and moon. So, he kept to the side of the street with Gop in tow, doing his best to avoid scrutiny from the locals, which seemed silly considering he was wrapped in a grey nano suit leading a developmentally delayed robot down the street after a bunch of alien militia.

  The fighting started shortly after.

  There were many ways to die, and Arker learned that on Raysor, on the street where the Jar’ron made war on humanity. Computer games were a unique brand of un-reality because they were shaped by creators with an imagination. Conversely, reality was a pragmatic place governed by physics and chemistry and shaped by sad, meaningless forces. Whatever created the universe, if one could say such a thing, merely wrote the rule book and pressed play. The deaths Arker saw on that street were the product of misfortune refracted by the lens of an uncaring universe.

  Arker would pass the victims of the Jar’ron, like a macabre slideshow or a museum tour filled with war dioramas. There, on a street corner, a man crumpled against a wall with his dark, thickening blood splattered about the stone and dirt. Then, a few steps later, someone half hidden by blocks of fallen stone, leaving just dusty legs, like a bookmark, to signpost murder. He saw someone dead in a doorway, clutching at the door handle. The woman looked perfectly whole; it was only the pool of blood at her knees and the bullet holes in the stonework that telegraphed a violent end. Then he found a torso with only one arm, half a neck and some ribs. All the other pieces were missing. Or the naked woman splayed on the street. Or the child lying in an alleyway with no clue as to the cause of death, just face down on the dirt and still as a stone. One that stuck with Arker was the man who sat against a wall; everything from the waist up was gone. It looked like he and the wall had been hit by a small fireball that had spread its charred constituents across the wall in a black starburst. It reminded Arker of a documentary he had seen about suicide where a veteran had killed himself with a phosphorus grenade.

  As he thought of documentaries, a relatively benign activity, it occurred to him; why the hell was he here? To find his father, his absent father...

  Other teenagers were drinking in parks, having sleepovers and writing code to cheat in their exams. Someone was hitting on the teacher at the school disco; someone else was lying to their parents. He was cheating on her, they were breaking up, and someone else was coming out. There were house parties filled with people doing their best impersonation of adult drunk and wild. There was tenderness and pillow talk, discovering the delicate intricacies of life, the structure of sadness and the foundations of happiness. And here he was, watching death stroll down the street and perusing the latest exhibition of its casual affair with violence. Escape, Arker, escape this reality and view it from another. That way, it’s all just another game.

  Up ahead, the Jar’ron were doing battle with the locals, but it wasn’t much of a fight. The bodies became more densely distributed on the street around him, and they began to display the paraphernalia of soldiery. They had combat harnesses and tactical vests, and they clutched weapons in knucks grey and stubborn with rigor mortis. Confronted with escalating horror, Arker kept himself safe within the realm of the observer, just another game.

  At that point blue starbursts up ahead accompanied a rapid thumping report; signally one of the Jar’ron was incinerating someone with high velocity plasma. The Jar’ron heavy with the plasma fixture was doing its best to bring swift, albeit violent, urban renewal to the colony.

  Arker’s already disjointed view of the carnage disappeared when a cloud of smoke and dust swirled down the street, reaching like the hand of a disaster. Then something bright flared up ahead, buried in the thick of the obscurity. There were flashes and strobes, crashing like Titans were locked in combat. Then the approaching smoke morphed from an arm into a billowing wave, and within it, a star formed at his heart. The star grew in intensity, from a candle to a blinding flare. Arker took a step back.

  The star grew wings and punched through the wall of dust, twin jet streams twisting away from its flight. It was a human figure, a warrior, in a golden suit of armour which glowed with light the colour of honey. The face was curious; it was statuesque, as if moulded by bronze and inspired by Classical Greek sculpture. But unlike Michelangelo’s David, this figure held a face of genuine sadness, with a small crown fixed to its head. Spreading from its back were broad angel wings fashioned from gold that shimmered with heat haze and left a trail of embers dancing through the smoky atmosphere. Like an eagle with a goat, the golden warrior held one of the Jar’ron in its grip. Arker stumbled backwards as the golden warrior smashed into the stone street, face up, staring at Arker as it ploughed the alien through the rock and dirt, gauntlet-clad hands gripping the Jar’ron’s chest plate.

  Its wings flared outwards, twice their original size and the golden warrior came to a halt not three meters from Arker. It was huge, at least the same size as the Jar’ron, and covered head to toe in gold armour, fashioned with an eye for artistic detail rather than crudeness of practicality. The Jar’ron groaned like a wounded animal and spat dark fluid from its cracked helmet. The Golden warrior stared at Arker momentarily; its eyes were orbs of the purest black, like miniature singularities.

  The dust swept along by the flight of the golden warrior rushed towards Arker, obscuring his view once again. Haze smothered the street, and he lost sight of the Jar’ron and the golden warrior.

  He took another step back. Then, as fast as it had appeared, the wall of dust and smoke continued, leaving the air clear again. Arker looked down and found the gargantuan form of the Jar’ron commando still wedged in an open sarcophagus of churned dirt and stone. Except this time, the Jar’ron was dead, courtesy of a bronze stake fixed through its skull. Dark liquid bubbled up around the metal like water from a spring. Its right leg began fasciculating in protest as Arker watched. He looked up and found the Golden warrior mid-flight, soaring back toward the fight.

  “I think we should head the other way now, Arker”, Gop suggested, kicking at the Jar’ron corpse with its tiny white foot.

  “No, we have to find Marneka. We should warn him about that Gold thing.” Arker stepped around the corpse and headed towards the battle.

  “Arker, I think that thing, the gold thing, is tracking me” Gop’s face plate was orange.

  “Why would it be tracking you? It’s obviously after the Jar’ron. We’ll be fine” Arker failed to mention that he was equally driven by an embarrassing voyeuristic desire to watch the unfolding carnage; history was being made here. He wanted to see Gods fight and watch the inhuman die in human ways.

  He jogged ahead and soon came to the back of the Jar’ron group, still marching down the street, exterminating anything that poked its head out, weapon or not. They exchanged fire with unseen combatants ahead, and tracers flicked about the street, shooting off into the sky like miniature meteors when they glanced off the Jar’ron armour. Explosions snapped and coughed, showering the group with stone fragments, but the Jar’ron were uncaring, weathering the near misses like robots without survival programming.

  Arker heard screaming from a nearby hovel; it sounded like a family. One of the Jar’ron took a step to the side, punched the plastic door open and tossed a grenade into the stone structure. The screaming cut off when the building contents were blasted from the doors and windows. Arker thought he saw body parts in smoke and flame. He felt his stomach wring itself like a towel.

  He shied away when one of the local resistance fired up a minigun somewhere up ahead. Immediately, one of the lead Jar’ron became a focal point for a stream of bright tracers that swept over the large warrior like fat, supersonic sparks. The tracers were deflected into a blaze of omnidirectional ricochets; rounds seared past Arker’s face, launched into the sky and shredded plastic stalls around the street. The barrage ended when one of the other commandos activated a small missile pod on its shoulder and fired two screaming projectiles into the hovel housing the chaingun.

  With one arm covering his face, Arker braved the incoming fire and ran forward to the rearmost Jar’ron warrior who had slowed down to reload its weapons. Arker reached out a hand to tap the alien on the side when something swept across his vision. He stumbled back. The Jar’ron was thrown across the street by a golden blur and smashed against the stone corner of a hovel, causing a minor detonation of stone and dust showering the street. Just as quickly as it had come, the airborne vigilante disappeared down an alley in a flash of sun shining on gold armour. The Jar’ron warrior smashed through the stone, losing an arm in the process, and pinwheeled out of view. Arker withdrew his shaking hand and peered down the alley to his left. The Jar’ron was motionless, spread-eagled on the dusty street amongst a pile of miscellaneous refuse. The gold thing could be seen shooting back into the sky a hundred meters distant.

  Arker put his hand back and stopped walking.

  All around him were the bits of the family that had just been blasted out of their own home. His faceplate came up in time with his spasming gag reflex.

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