Chapter 15: Escalation
Cato had gotten a lot of people killed for no reason.
If he’d had more time, if he’d been allowed to open discussions and negotiations with those on Haekos, if he’d realized what the Azoth had been intending to do — if and if and if. Instead, people, hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, had been annihilated because of the whims of a high ranker that he should have stopped, but hadn’t. Worse, the entire disaster didn’t even matter. The expansion was still going on, and he didn’t even know if the Azoth was permanently dead, as Yaniss had heard the highest ranks could resurrect under the right circumstances.
“I suppose it’s controlled from the core worlds,” Leese mused.
“That means we need to get access to the core worlds before we can be sure of stopping an expansion,” Raine said grimly.
Cato Koh-rel didn’t reply, his human frame still staring at the visual feed of where the portal to Haekos had once been. A small bit of him was envious of the version of himself on the other side, as that instance would only know that the System was gone and the portal wasn’t opening — but that was a small twinge, ruthlessly squashed. That version also had to deal with an utterly devastated population and equally devastated planet.
Something he would be addressing himself, and soon. Seventeen hours was not nearly enough time to move the forces he had around Koh-rel into position, and it had just been demonstrated that was a useless gesture anyway. He needed to get into the world itself and shut it down from that end — after the apocalypse brought on by the System. The only comfort he could draw from situation was that the people on the other side would be genuinely happy about removing the System from their world, and they would have the memories and artifacts of whatever civilization had been destroyed. There would be something to rebuild.
“Things could have gone worse,” Leese said, sending a ping through the network to make sure she had his attention. “And now we know some of the consequences when we take over a world.”
“We do,” Cato replied, taking a long breath and letting it out, finding himself too soul-weary to contest Leese’s choice of words. The Haekos version of himself had managed to transmit a lot of data before the portals closed, giving him a first-hand look at System collapse. Landscapes rearranging themselves, swaths of flora and fauna choking and dying in an atmosphere no longer meant for them, or vanishing outright as the System-stuff that composed them collapsed back into base reality. There was even a very clear shot of a Bismuth puffing into nothingness just before the portals closed, demonstrating a very grim reality that they would have to contend with.
He, on the other hand, had a lot of work to do in order to prepare for the portal opening, since he needed to pour as much biomass through the portal as he could. If he wanted to actually save people, he needed to get things going fast, not through the slow and subtle growth he’d used on thousands of worlds. To judge by how things had gone on Earth, the higher ranks would be discouraged from going through until the lower ranks had been given a chance — but with Cato’s presence, there was no telling what would happen.