Quoted By:
You have to take a deep breath of tanked oxygen. Twice, before you’re able to give your report. “…three <span class="mu-i">extremely</span> violent points of exit, blown out forward and mid compartments. Confirming damage from either railgun or gauss anti-orbital artillery.”
Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the “Heroes” of Babylonia.
Those are the names of two former Starguard Anti-Orbital Defense System (SADOS) weapons. At the city’s founding, they were salvaged from the bottom of the ocean, and mounted in special fortresses on the slopes of Mount Gugalanna. Every nation in the Flooded World has their big stick or deterrent against attackers. It just so happens that your home has two of them that can put armor-piercing shells in enemy battleships as far away as 600 km. Maybe 800 if the city diverts all its power.
The Heroes are what allow Babylonia to enforce both its sovereignty, and strict neutrality for all those who wish to come and trade. And their current capabilities are nowhere near what a properly-maintained SADOS would have been prior to the Cataclysm. 2000 kilometers according to urban legend.
The <span class="mu-i">Olympia</span>, one of the dozens of civilian ships comprising the Exodus Fleet that fled Earth during the Cataclysm…had been shot out of the sky.
Turns out that when only the uber-rich and most affluent of the 1% can afford tickets off-world during the end of the world, people get…angry. Angry enough for a population with nothing left to lose launching a violent, populist uprising. And in that uprising, more than a handful of anti-asteroid weapons were seized or their disgruntled staff opened up the gates stick it to their escaping superiors.
Larkin said that it was out of pure spite that they aimed the barrels of those guns towards the Exodus Fleet as they climbed into the upper atmosphere. They would shoot as long as they could, and drag as many as they could screaming back down to Earth. No one was escaping the Scouring if they could help it.
“God have mercy,” the XO whispers, voicing the lump in your throat.
Aalto is silent, for once. Holt doesn’t offer anything, but you can hear a sharp hiss of breath on her end of the line. Elishani, however, remains cool, and the captain decisively orders: “Proceed with caution, Razor. Bug out if you even feel that the structure’s unstable or about to collapse.”
“You got it, sir,” you answer, hitting the pedal. “I’ll keep you guys posted.”
Given the devastation that a SADOS can cause, it’s nothing short of a miracle that the <span class="mu-i">Olympia</span> didn’t burn up on the way down. Or otherwise crumple and warp under its own mass. Splitting in half seems to have been a fair enough compromise for the laws of physics.
As you come up in the shadow cast by its mangled end, you come to a stop and survey the wreck. “HOPI, talk to me. What’s our insertion point?”
(cont.)
