Tonstar Rising Ch. 01

Captain du Pont called for Michaels' replacement to try and hail the Panzer.

-- USNAS Orbital Platform Delta One, Mars orbit --

Jeremy could see the camera move about as his brother James entered a car and started flying away from the house. "Switching you to the dash." The perspective changed, and Jeremy could see the anxious faces of James and his wife, Helen, as they fled from the capital outskirts.

After a couple of minutes, Jeremy muttered, "Oh shit," causing James to look down at the call screen. Even though he was flying at breakneck speed, pushing the car past its limits, he was high enough to look away for a couple of seconds. The plot had been replaced by a visual of the enemy ship entering orbit. The ship was firing something straight at the city they raced away from. By now, James was almost 100 kilometers from the edge of the city proper with the distance widening quickly, but would it be enough? His wife, watching out the side windows, screamed as something white streaked down to hit the city center.

There was a blinding white light behind them that filled the car. His wife kept screaming, and the ground started buckling 100 meters below them, causing wild fluctuations with the air currents, which shook their flight with massive turbulence. He looked at the rear visuals to see an immense black plateau rising out of the place where New Atlantis used to be when the shockwave hit and the car shut down. With the loss of power the built in anti-crash cushioning deployed, cutting off his vision from everything. His wife was sobbing that she couldn't see, his son was crying, and the car was tumbling wildly through the sky, making him nauseous. That ended when the car hit the ground.

-- AHPS Lenin, Mars orbit --

Before Kartsov could begin issuing new orders, another voice, deep, rich in bass, and very foreboding came out of nowhere and everywhere.

"Interlopers, what have you done? Why have you exposed that which was hidden? Did you think to master this power so quickly?"

The demanding pings of incoming communication requests flooded in, each faction seeking answers.

"Sir, the USNA, the EU, orbitals, Mars, hell everyone is requesting anyone else to answer their hail. They are all talking over themselves in the clear."

Karstov couldn't take his eyes off the forward screen. The blackness seemed to be growing larger. As if the 10 million souls of those he just vaporized decided to stay behind. He finally found his voice again trying his best to fall back on training and kept his voice steady and clipped.

"No comms. Engineering, get our drives back online. I want us out of this atmosphere and into sublight five minutes ago. Tactical, is the area of impact expanding?"

His voice was enough to regain command of the situation and refocus the command staff.

"Radius of impact has not changed. The effect we are seeing is increasing vertically and will soon be reaching the upper atmosphere."

"The USNA are descending to the surface. UN frigates are holding."

"No inbound missiles anywhere."

"Comms are still full."

"Bulkheads have sealed off our leaks."

"Damage control reports 17 casualties."

"Engines are back online."

Hearing what he needed, Karstov immediately bellowed "All ahead full, get us into space."

He could feel the ship beneath him surge and fight the atmosphere. Examining his plot he calculated they would gain enough velocity to survive unless the EU frigates decided to pursue. It was a narrow window and much better than what was expected when he started their attack run. Their suicide run was looking a little less suicidal and a tad bit more optimal.

Karstov looked to his left, barking "Helm, what's our escape window?"

The answer was not what he wanted. "Sir! We just lost all velocity relative to Mars! All stopped! We are unable to move!"

Karstov's mind churned. How was this possible? Even getting past the impossible feat of instantly bleeding all velocity there were still the effects to consider. At their speed, the inertial dampeners should have failed resulting in everyone compressed into paste inside their skinsuits. Considering the black void reaching up from the surface, the fact they were still alive, and the ominous disembodied voice from before, the ability to instantaneously brake was the smallest impossible act to add onto the growing list. Almost as if summoned by the thought the voice returned.

"You cannot run away from your actions in cowardice. Since you have released me and mine you shall be rewarded with a portion of the Power. Since you have released the Others you shall be equally punished with a portion of theirs. Your motivations will be your judgment. Your honor. Your anger. Your cowardice, avarice, altruism, hedonism, every aspect will be judged. Now reap what you have sewn."

Groans and yells of pain began filtering in from every section of the ship within hearing. Karstov reached for his sidearm to fend off whatever new attack the voice had brought forth. When he grasped his weapon in its holster his fingers cramped in pain. He brought his hand back to determine the injury then gasped in horror as his knuckles split open, shards of bones breaking through the skin. The pain quickly raced up his arms and encompassed his entire chest. Doubling over as he succumbed to the pain his last conscious thoughts were filled with the screams of those next to him.

-- USNAS Memphis, Mars orbit --

"Entering atmosphere Captain."

"Keep us at least 100 kilos from that... whatever that is. Ground zero." Straight called out. The damage matched nothing in his personal knowledge base but all appearances said New Atlantis ceased to exist along with its population. "Get drop shuttles launched, now, all of them. Full SAR sweeps. Find me someone."

"Defenders. You failed to halt the assault against our domain and the Power. Despair." The sudden silky, very feminine voice reverberated in Straight's skull. All the commotion on the bridge had frozen, nobody moved and the only sounds were the electronic alarms and the omnipresent voice. "For your failure, you shall be punished."

"Defenders. We have emerged. You have shown your faith in defending our domain and the Power. Rejoice. For your aid, you shall be rewarded. Learn well this Power, the Others will come." The voice grew heavier as a bright spot appeared in his vision. The spot quickly grew wider and brighter until finally he could no longer see and the light consumed him.

-- EUSS Trident, Mars orbit --

The CIC had devolved into chaos around Captain Jacque Pierre du Pont de Nemours and in his mind he was about to lose his shit as the youngsters would say. As insubordinate as Leftenant Michaels was, he was equally as competent and his current state of unconsciousness only added to the confusion. His backup, in a separate signals room located two bulkheads away, was not responding to calls and solid communications were key in situations such as this. No one in the signals section was answering.

"Who has communications experience? I need you on that console ASAP, contact the Panzer and clarify her status. Get my visuals back online, now! Now means now people!"

"Meddlers hear me!" a very feminine voice pummeled du Pont's senses, demanding his attention.

"Where did that come from?" he cried out in stark fear.

The voice did not answer him, instead it continued with its message. "Meddlers, why have you forsaken the Power and aided the Others? Your actions doom this plane of existence. Despair, for your actions you will be punished. Despair, for your delay of the Defenders you are denied any portion of the Power."

The absence of the voice left the CIC in silence until a scream rent the air. Leftenant Michaels had opened his eyes when he began his screaming but there were no pupils, only the whites could be seen which were quickly filling with veins of red. His body was taught like it was being stretched and his face was a rictus of violence and painful death. Du Pont got up from his command chair to provide what aid he could when his legs failed him. His scream of pain added to the other screams now filling the ship.

-- Mars, due west of New Atlantis --

Thadius Tonstar slowly came back to consciousness to find himself staring at a wall of white fabric. Disoriented, he looked about and tried to move but the white fabric was everywhere and he found that his entire body hurt. "Mom? Dad?" he cried out, not sure where they were. Then he remembered they were in the car. Dad had been rushed. Mom had been crying and then screaming. Then the blinding flash of light and the car falling.

They had crashed. This white stuff must be the emergency crash cushion Mom had warned about triggering when he was caught goofing around in the car. He called out to Mom and Dad again but there was no answer. He was only a few months past his fourth nameday, barely nine earth years old. He was scared, alone, and hurt, he couldn't get his right arm to move. He started crying until he fell asleep.

Sometime later he was woken when a person in a uniform placed him on a stretcher. Their face was hidden behind their helmet, the anonymity scared him more than the crash or the pain. He was rapidly moved and deposited into one of the shuttles that Tad liked to watch lift cargo into orbit. Once his stretcher was secured he was able to get a glimpse out of the door before it fully closed. His parent's skycar was a mangled mass of metal and debris scattered as far as he could see. The fuselage had separated into three sections, one of those still burned with a blue flamed fire. In the distance beyond was a wall of solid black clouds streaked with lightning. The door shut and one of the people that rescued him placed a brace around his neck which stopped him from moving his head any further.

"Any word from the Memphis?" the words startled Thadius. With his head secured he was unable to move his eyes enough to see who had spoken.

"Did any other teams find transponders?" whoever was speaking must be using a headset. Thadius could only hear this side of the conversation.

"They are stable." They?

The voice got excited. "She's coming down? What's her ETA?"

As quickly as the excitement had appeared it was replaced with a despondent tone. "Roger."

Thadius slept.

-- Mars, USNA Naval Base, Fort Denning, March 6th, 2374 A.D. --

Thadius woke at the sound of his mother's voice. He knew her angry voice well, so he kept quiet and listened, not willing to inadvertently incur any of her wrath.

"You need to retrieve my husband, now! I don't care what else is going on or how many ships are crashing into the planet. Do you know who he is? How important he is to this planet?"

"Ma'am, we are beyond stretched thin out there. What shuttles we still have in service are breaking down faster than we can save people. We do not have the capability of retrieving your husband's remains even if we wanted to. I am not sending an expedition on foot halfway across Mars either. I understand you are in mourning, but we need to save who we can!" The woman his mother was arguing with was reaching the exasperation stage Thadius often heard in his dad's voice when Mom demanded something out of his control.

"He is the planetary commissioner!"

"Was. Was the planetary commissioner, ma'am. I'm sorry for your loss, I truly am, but we have to prioritize resources to pull survivors from the Memphis crash site. Please, the living require our time now, the dead will have to wait." Thadius heard brisk footsteps and a door closing as his mother's sobs filled the room.

-- Mars, USNA Naval Base, Fort Denning, March 4th, 2384 A.D. 5 AGR --

Thadius wearily sat down to breakfast; he desperately needed sleep but knew it was not going to happen. "Suck it up, Marine," he thought to himself as he ate the bowl of gruel that someone, was it Martha maybe, had set before him. His physical movements were automatic; he lacked the clarity of thought to fully direct them himself. Halfway through his meal, he noticed someone had taken the seat beside him and was talking. To him apparently.

"Thadius, Mars to Thadius, you in there, Marine?"

Thadius looked over and up to the tall woman beside him. She was half a Martian year younger, a full Earth year, but somehow she always looked older than Thadius. Kami Valor grinned at him. "There you are." For once Thadius was glad for the tiredness consuming him. When he had full use of his faculties, Kami was a proven, tried and true means to make Thadius lose any train of thought or understandable speech pattern he normally used.

"It was her eyes," he errantly thought to himself. They were oddly placed, set slightly wider than what was usual, and slightly large as well, naturally thick lashes and thick but shapely eyebrows framed them. They tended to draw people's attention, but Thadius found himself constantly being lost in them, staring until she would ask what was wrong in a nervous sort of chuckle she used when she was feeling self-conscious. She had a longer, romanesque nose which he knew she hated, but he couldn't imagine her without it. Her lips were full and luscious and Thadius spent most of his 'private time' fantasizing about fun activities he could engage in with those lips. She hated her military short blonde mass of hair but again, she wouldn't be Kami without it.

"What was her eyes? Is something wrong?" Kammi asked with that nervous chuckle. "My eyes?"

"Fuck, sorry, did I say that out loud? My head is still half asleep, whatever dream was going on is fading out."

"Ooo, you have a dream girl? What is she like?" Kami asked insistently.

"She's you, Kami. Poor Tad only has eyes for you." A voice from the table behind them said.

"Fuck off, Carter, before I make sure you can't fuck again." Thadius replied in a steel voice, the tiredness now masked. He turned to look at his heckler. "Seriously, this planet is over its quota for asshole bitches, and I will gladly help correct that imbalance."

"See Kami, struck a nerve with that one. Fuck off Tonstar; your name isn't what it used to be." Carter shot back.

"When I'm done fucking you up, you won't be what you used to be either. There's only so much an infirmary can do." Thadius' glare won out, and Carter put his head down to continue eating.

A hand on his arm drew his attention back away from the other table. "Careful, Tad. Carter has friends you have to go on patrol with. What he says doesn't bother me, so it shouldn't bother you. Are you going to the ceremony?"

It took longer than it should have for her question to register. "Ceremony?"

"It's the anniversary today, Tad, if you want to go, I'll go with you." Kami said with an almost pleading voice.

"Sure, Kami, we can go. The roster will be light on patrols with the ceremony taking place."

The anniversary. Five long Martian years. Five years of pure hell as the human race, at least on Mars, faced extinction. The weapon strike on New Atlantis had changed everything. The current administration had begun referring to it as the Rending a few months after. One of the newsies came up with it, and the label stuck. The scientist left alive had studied the surrounding area where the weapon effects were still ongoing, a black cylinder of negative energy rising into the upper atmosphere. They were unable to study it long; the closer to the event they moved, the more 'changes' happened. Humans became something else.

It started with the wreckage of the ships that had battled over the Martian skies that day. The Memphis was the focus at first, and there were more survivors than expected when the hull was breached and search parties entered the ship, only there were not many human survivors. Instead, a steady stream of 'people' in clothing either now too large or stretched to the point of ripping were pulled out of the wreckage. They fit classic archetypes, and the names stuck. Elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, it was like Tolkien's novels had exploded when the ship hit the surface. All that was missing was the goblins, orcs, ogres, trolls, giants, and other fell beasts.

After the Memphis was emptied, the rescue parties went to check the other wrecks. The closest to the new base of operations was an EU ship, later determined to be the Panzer. There were no human survivors to be found; instead, the area around the wreck teamed with creatures only talked about in fantasy novels. Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, fairies, just about any fey folk that could be easily brought to mind. The ship couldn't be entered; the new fauna proved too dangerous to approach. The second ship proved the same, another EU ship named the Trident, so all rescue attempts were called off before they began.

The last ship the rescue parties went to was where the missing fell beasts made themselves known. The first shuttle that landed was quickly overrun by a pack of orcs who relaunched the shuttle a few hundred yards before one of the assault shuttles shot it down. The ambush on the second shuttle was fought off at a high casualty rate, and the SAR teams fled back to their forward base.

Towns and villages that radiated out from the abyss that was New Atlantis were evacuated as reports of people changing into other forms escalated. It didn't take long to understand that reports of people changing were spreading out in a gradually expanding radius from ground zero and all four starship wrecks. The global effects were worse.

New Atlantis had been a sprawling metropolis on a peninsula situated on the equator for the most warmth, jutting out between the northern and southern seas. Whatever the column of black something was that now encased the region immediately began to suck in the ocean water, all of it. The terraforming of Mars gave it artificial oceans in the lower basins where it was assumed the original oceans had been; however, they lacked the depth and continental shelves of Earth's oceans. The great northern sea was at a much higher elevation than the southern, so in an astonishingly small amount of time, a couple of Martian years, the north sea vanished, replaced by a huge muddy pit, with occasional lakes of trapped seawater, with a massive layer of dead and decaying sea life slowly sinking into the mud. The southern ocean retreated to the edge of the blackness, leaving cliffs instead of beaches where it retreated from the sparse Martian continents.

The loss of so much water eradicated existing weather cycles and replaced them with an unpredictable climate. Beside the new fauna from changed humans, new flora also sprung forth, sometimes overtaking and replacing the Earth-based flora that had been imported. What was left of Humanity on Mars retreated to the opposite face of Mars, as far from New Atlantis as they could get, and centered around Fort Denning, a smaller outpost built on the banks of a river close to where it emptied into the sea. It mainly served as a commercial port, leaving it well-stocked with goods and a defensible position as a bonus. The most anyone could hope for after the series of disasters everyone faced. However, as the asinine words of the stupid insipid ads that spammed everyone's lives went, the extinction of said ads was the only silver lining Thadius could think of, 'but wait folks, there's more.'

Attempts to contact Earth all failed even though they continued for as long as was possible. Earth failed to send anyone to check on the distressed colony as well. The scheduled monthly shipments never arrived. Power generators began to fail without explanation and, with the lack of ready power, the fabricators began to go silent. Solar collectors could not keep up demand in the feeble sun and, with fabricators going dormant left and right, there was no capacity to create enough panels to continue relying on electronics. A few months after the Rending, the orbitals that were still manned went silent. All shuttles were grounded and could no longer fly. Farms struggling with the massive climate change came under intense pressure as their tractors and combines faltered. With the lack of recharge capacity, anything automated shut down. The famine hit hard. On the day of the Rending, Mars' population stood at 101,237,892 human souls. Two Martian years later, there were fewer than four hundred thousand and the number was declining.