Chapter 12: Carnage

“Craig, before we go to the hospital, tell me about the oracle’s predictions about your young lady,” Orma Brecht Chatzke asked. They were seated at her table for breakfast five minutes after she received the call about the Dinnion attack and the destruction at the hospital. Several of her general officers were on the way over.

“My security forces don’t know if the place is secure enough for us to see what happened. I want to understand why you, your sons, Porquenta, Chuck, and Chloe feel she is so important.”

“Brecht, I will show you, and you can decide once you know what we saw and heard.”

Craig pulled out his slate and set up a hologram.

“Here, she and her friends told us about the predictions of oracles when Chuck asked if anyone had made any predictions about her. I will start when he asks her.”

Craig played the section where Heather told the story of the visits to the oracles, and then they heard about what Horti had asked the others to study.

“She knew she would be severely injured. She told us when a few days ahead. We all had her instructions, including her medical will. She tasked me to ensure she got out of the regency and into your treatment.”

“I don’t know how we will keep this from your father,” said Orma.

“You tell him most of it. We must only keep Horti from meeting him and the game from him for a year. We can tell him all the rest. Do we know if Horti’s friends survived?”

“They were all critically injured. We will reconstruct them. The Dinnion showed up in much larger numbers than her friends predicted. Our guards were too complacent and didn’t take her friend’s advice seriously enough. So far, we have limited information. We have yet to discover the details. We have ample surveillance equipment to help clarify the picture. We will soon know every word spoken by Horti’s friends. We gave them rooms to sleep in and made a doctor’s office available for the daytime. They chose to remain in the doctor’s office. The offices have surveillance, and my intelligence people are working to discover what happened.”

Orma Chatzke’s secretary walked in. “Orma, Osgood called; our troops have secured the hospital, and he wants to show you the extent of the damage. He is ready for you at the hospital; the admiral has prepared a preliminary report and will speak to it. He suggests your guards accompany you, deploying battle armor. We secured a portal to the doctor’s area.”

“I cannot believe the extent of the damage. One ward is a smoldering wreck. Two floors cracked along the exit path of the wave. The second wall has a forty-meter diameter hole. The building next door looks like a giant punched a hole through it!” Orma exclaimed.

“Do we know how many Dinnion came to kill this young woman, Osgood?” Orma Chatzke asked.

“We found fifty-nine bodies here and ten across the road. One of the Dinnion, number sixty, was vaporized down to the molecular level. We found a piece of an identification chip and carbon but no DNA. The Dinnion general sent three platoons of special forces specialists and a command unit,” said Osgood. “We believe two incomplete platoons escaped.”

“All that for one young girl who was guilty of nothing. Such malice!” Brecht exclaimed. “Craig and I read the Dinnion media report yesterday. Do we have the equivalents of the Naturalista?”

“No, but all the humanoid civilizations do. The Dinnion group formed an Empire-wide terrorist alliance,” said Osgood. “The Dinnion hospital infiltrators were carrying loads of explosives; they intended to blow up the hospital to cover their tracks.”

“Did they carry enough to blow up the whole hospital?” Craig asked, “Is that even possible; it is a huge place?”

“Yes, Craig, and they would have blown up half of each city block around the hospital; that is half of eight city blocks.”

“How did our troops repel them?” Orma Chatzke asked.

“They didn’t. The Dinnion sent in three small advance units to neutralize our sentries. They found the Colonel and the reserve unit and neutralized them. They were relaxing and did not use helmets. The gas killed them.”

“That is nasty,” said Craig.

“It gets worse. They then gassed the three corridors they intended to use. The platoon split and advanced along the passageway, killing all en route. They hit the student warning runes, then the first traps. The first trap killed half of them. They spread out further. The second trap killed another ten. They had twenty left; five walked as if wounded and died within fifty meters. Five went ahead to reconnoiter.

The students killed them using fireballs, ice blocks, and lightning. They damaged the corridor.”

“Where were our troops?”

“They were dead. None of them had put on their helmets,” explained Osgood.

“The students came under fire, but they shielded themselves. One of them, who the others had cloaked, ran down the side of the corridor, managed to get past the Dinnion through the dust and smoke, and got behind them. He picked up an assault rifle but could not use it as it was coded to the user. He then tried to use a sidearm but could not use it for the same reason. Finally, he grabbed the grenades and knife from one of the Dinnion. He raced to the corner and threw the grenades. He killed another five, but they shot him. He continued going despite his wound and killed a Dinnion with his knife. They injured him critically.”

“This is an incredible story,” said Orma Chatzke.

“The students believed only five Dinnion were trying to kill their friend in the pod. They believed the Dinnion had outstanding armor, and most of the original group was still coming. After seeing Dinnion through the dust and smoke, one of them sent a cone of power just like the Emperor, which caused the damage you saw. It pulverized the Dinnion and went through the hospital. The last student standing, Heather, sent a counter wave to neutralize it. She partly missed the first time. The second counter wave stopped the cone, but not before it hit the building next door,” said Osgood. “If the students hadn’t remained to protect Horti, the Dinnion would have killed her and blasted the hospital and half of eight city blocks to dust.”

“The damage the students caused while defending the hospital and their friend is significant but minor in the broader scheme of things,” said Orma.

“How are the students?” Craig asked.

“All of them have critical injuries. The doctors informed me the weapons the Dinnion used contravened all Uzliumbax and Dinnion laws. They continue to melt tissue after they strike. They are melting the students slowly but surely. When it hits flesh, it creates a spreading toxin that destroys more tissue,” said Osgood.

“Can we rebuild them?” Craig asked

“The student who killed the Dinnion with a knife was the simplest to deal with; we backed him up quickly. Like the one in the pod, the other students have massive consciousnesses that take time to back up. It is a race against time to recover them fully,” said Gen. Osgood Grunwald.

“How big are we talking about?” Orma asked.

“The one in the pod took two hours. Her backup to her crystal, as was her learning machine secondary memory, was almost complete. Two of them had recoverable memory on learning machines. The last young woman was hit in the pelvis, destroying her learning machine, and we are not sure her crystal is operating correctly. We lost power briefly while they were backing her up. It was further Dinnion sabotage, a latent AI attack on the hospital power control system. The doctors began the process again.

“If the measures they use fail, the doctors are considering a last-ditch effort by removing her head, then her brain. They hope to salvage the crystal and recover what they can from it. The Dinnion Queen has sent several medical teams to assist and a team that builds and repairs crystals. Dinnion intelligence vetted them using pod brain dumps. We are not allowing any of them to be in a position to damage or kill the young woman or our original one in the pod,” said Osgood.

“What do you want me to tell the Emperor’s intelligence people, Brecht?” Osgood asked.

“Tell him saboteurs attempted to blow up the hospital and are part of the terrorist group originating in the Dinnion regency. The Dinnion will not speak of the girl or this event with him,” said Orma Chatzke.

“Why is this young woman such an important target?” Osgood asked.

“Come to dinner this evening, and Craig will explain about the girl. I trust you will have a full report by then. I want to know why our people did not perform as they should. I also wish to know how sixty special forces attacked us, and we had no idea, despite the warnings from the young woman’s friends, that they were coming. Why did we not take this seriously? I want the whole story,” demanded Orma. “What is wrong with our military and our intelligence? A squad of assassins can buzz into our capital undetected and enter a hospital within five minutes beetle flight to our seat of government. They gassed our soldiers and attempted to kill someone entrusted to us by the Senior Empress, the Emperor’s son and a Queen of the Collective.”

“Orma, I will report fully this evening.”

“Osgood, the Emperor, saved us from a devastating attack. Your intelligence service failed to discover the threat. We knew of a threat this time, but our forces proved incompetent and didn’t listen. That is inexcusable.”

“What are your instructions?” Osgood asked.

“Osgood send a message to the general of the central regiment. Her career is on the line. Gen. Chibuzo Chydea will spend the rest of her career as a guard in a storage base on one of our ice planets if the young woman or any of her friends suffers a misadventure. I will not tolerate complacency and incompetence. You can tell your much-vaunted intelligence service they are on thin ground. Osgood, I know this is not over. The general behind the attacks is deranged, and the Naturalista have been a claw in the side of the Dinnion for longer than I have been alive. Now they are on our territory, and we know nothing. How can we deal with threats before our faces and not react?”

Maruk Pervan was an electronics engineer who specialized in advanced crystal design. She was second in command to her boss of seven centuries, Morgol Kimp. She loathed him. He knew nothing, did nothing, and irritated the life out of her. She was part of the team of seven who had designed and were responsible for manufacturing the latest Dinnion crystal implanted in the students. She was honored to be part of a team on official duty under the queen’s command. Her team was ordered to ensure that if the consciousness of the student Heather could not be recovered from her brain, they would provide the necessary data from the crystal. Technically the process was simple; she needed to tell the Collective engineers how to switch the crystal on.

Something about Morgol was nagging at her. Something was wrong. He was agitated, arranging and rearranging his slate. He rarely reacted to anything. He lived his life half asleep, but something was going on. Maruk was alert and wary. She trusted him no further than she could see through him.

Maruk joined the team thirty thousand years ago. She joined an inspired team of AI electronics and programming specialists. The team leader was a brilliant creator and designer who had developed seventy generations of crystals. Morgol was an uninspired, ineffective team member and wasn’t liked by anyone. Seven hundred years ago, her boss Hervan Nektak left the team to run the family business after his parents died in an accident. Hervan was convinced someone had killed his parents.

Inexplicably, Morgol became the team leader. Morgol made a critical design error she discovered in the first crystal produced under his supervision. He blamed the mistake on one of the team members and removed him for incompetence. She confronted Morgol, and he formally warned her she was being insubordinate and threatened to fire her if she libeled him any further. She loved the job and shut up. Furthermore, she knew she couldn’t prove Morgol had covered up his error and blamed someone else.