The Justiceers - Part Two - Chapter Seven
the next chapter in my forthcoming novel
The Justiceers
by Daphne Garrido
Part Two: Wave of Mutilation
2.7
Carrigan’s horde was on the move, deployed to survey the situation evolving the next valley over, beyond the uppermost ridge of this crater Persephone Station called home.
Cracks forming between emergences on Grammaton’s surface had expanded far beyond the scope of what Carrigan found themself comfortable with, infringing upon his internal sense of safety. He’d dispatched the mobile horde to dig up answers. They would pay in lives lost.
Preparations were being made throughout the station, in-fact across the whole planet, as well as in orbit, readying for a full evacuation of forces. Carrigan’s time operating upon Grammaton was nearing its end. Yet, with so much still to do and understand, the overwhelming amount of planetary eccentricities left unstudied, he was feeling bitter.
If it weren’t for these Justiceers, and especially their reinforcements who’s travels he’d been tracking so judiciously, Carrigan would just stay and own this place from orbit. It was The Conclave’s well-earned reputation for tenaciousness, unforgetting memory, and attention to detail which had him planning to escape before their supporting envoy arrived.
Still, he’d have to deal with these two. There was no way for him to move his forces without being seen, their eyes so trained upon the planet, drones everywhere.
Carrigan was fully utilizing the AI shackled within Persephone’s Station — itself a slave to his bidding, like all his conscripts, in chains of manipulative control — to employ constant observance of these Justiceers movements, and those of their deployed technologies.
Their lack of secrecy, showing themselves so plainly, seemed an unacceptable arrogance to Carrigan. He detested the way they paraded about in the open with no regard for who might be watching. It was slap to he face of the way he understood power, triggering the parts unseen by himself which resented his own isolation. Vulnerability was purely weakness, and he’d not let this naivety go unpunished.
They would pay not only for their insolence to his values, and those reflections he’d not want to see in their virtue, but for being unaware of his own supremacy.
Within his churning mind, struggling under the weight of this psychic and spiritual pressure created by their presence, he’d finally decided it once and for all; Carrigan Marks would go down in the written histories of The Periphery, he was done hiding.
Ash was beside Carrigan’s in an observation room just off the station’s cathedral-like portal chamber, barricaded behind an encasement of protective proxy-glass, watching a line of chosen infantry prepare for their spin of fate’s cruelest wheel—their pass through the portal.
Nearly all scientists at his disposal were working to stabilize conscripts who’d made it through and were mostly holding-together, molding them into Ravagers, ignoring the time to stabilize Ash had in their recovery, proceeding straight to most severe cybernetic augmentation. So very many were dying, and his scientists too, the complications for each pass through unique to the subject, many prone to violent expulsions of energetic emergence.
Carrigan now had a half-dozen non-critically conditioned Ravagers waiting for their activation in warming tanks. Beyond this, he was preparing his battleship; the War Hawk.
Everything Carrigan flew ran stealth, and his battleship was no exception. One of a kind, nowhere in the known galaxy had such a feat of space faring engineering been achieved. It was a most ruthless and viscous machine of death, armed to its gills with weaponry beyond petty moralities of The Periphery. He’d not imagine a slightest hope for any challenger to survive its wrathful onslaught.
Many conscripts would need to be left behind, having accumulated so many lost souls, pulled along within the wake of his brutality. He’d not be able to fit them aboard his battleship. The concern in Carrigan was not for loss of life. It was for the simple chance he might run out of hearts to shred before making landfall upon some new world to dominate.
Another lost puppet of his manipulation stepped forward towards their fate.
Carrigan wondered if the poor sap had even met him — who had, and loved her leader dearly — as she’d emerged from the other side, seemingly turned inside-out, yet, somehow still upright, screaming a most horrifyingly curdled tone.
‘That’s a new one,” he’d said absentmindedly, opening and scrolling through the interface on the control terminal before him, quickly navigating sub-menus, pulling up an active map of his conscripts, finding this shouting infantrywoman and selecting them from the crowd.
Carrigan turned her off then — using his micro-technologies to sever the brainstem. He couldn’t stand the sound of weakness.
Apart from readying the War Hawk in orbit and Carrigan’s continued efforts to produce more Ravagers, which he’d now left within the soulless hands of Ash, there was another important project to oversee.
This group of precious scientists and engineers were assembling a send-receive station for the personnel transporter, which would complete its mirrored archway upon the War Hawk, allowing him to continue these efforts of creating Ravagers far beyond the limits of when his own instincts for self-preservation would allow himself to keep the whole of his forces in this fragile position Persephone Station found itself in upon the crumbling surface of Grammaton.
This was not ideal, but it would have to do. Carrigan would endeavor first and foremost to survive, as always, and dispose of any and all attachments he needed to do so.
Still, the portal was where he’d subscribed purpose for so long. To lose it now, when it was only beginning to truly take form, no matter how clear the calls from the world around him to abandon it, was not something Carrigan would accept. The last place he’d ever find himself was without control over his own destiny.
The way fate pushed him felt a challenge to his very way of operating. He’d not yield, so hardened in routes of self-absorption, never to release this way he’d learned to be. Knowledge was something he bestowed onto others. Teaching in his ways of darkest wrath and cunning, birthing longing in hearts of the desperate, taking everything he wanted.
Carrigan would never stop. The Ravagers would be his, and they would be a sight to behold. He’d make this universe bend to his will.
Nothing could change this man.
The Arbor Room’s energy was now tainted by disappointment, so many nights spent standing in the silence of its crimson down pouring, Carrigan found himself enraged upon sight of his archway to the gods.
Since the thermonuclear detonation in Oliath — itself a most frustrating and anomalous thorn in Carrigan’s side, always disapproving terror wrought of other’s designs — his ally had gone dark.
Were they behind it? Was their ability to communicate disabled by this attack?
Carrigan didn’t understand and that was unacceptable. Tonight would be his last visit to this place, he’d decided that on his own.
He’d given them so many chances. Standing here in waiting for hours upon hours, night after night. This would be their last chance, one final try at opening himself to receive, but he’d not offer them the ability to disappoint him again. Nobody made Carrigan feel less than the emperor he’d appointed himself to be.
Bathed in The Arbor’s light, feeling such hatred coursing throughout his body, that voice finally spoke.
“Carrigan Marks,” it began, circumventing the epithet it has bestowed, signifying great importance to its following words.
“They’re coming for me.”
