Ex Lacrima Remnant

#B-Side XV – Anomaly

The first hand turned on the display. Two perfect circles. One centered on the seedship. One from a point further East. As planned. As expected. The third circle, though, wasn’t complete.

It left a ‘hole’.

A ‘hole’ the size of a building.

The second hand zoomed on it, at the highest resolution. Yet, that only made it blurrier. The satellites weren’t cooperating. The third hand turned some knobs, while the messages flew to and from the main brain. The picture faded, shifted, disappeared. The fourth hand started checking the backdoor, sent a program through it again.

The third circle towered over the screen, as it was doing before.

But the hole was still there.

And the picture disappeared once again.

A backdoor in their backdoor. That brought their secondary brain back, back to the previous iteration. An old trick, one that ‘that humanity’ found out about already once. Struggling to keep control on their own satellites, hijacked from superior technology. It was a war of attrition, one ‘that humanity’ couldn’t win.

The fifth hand recalled an archive. Fifteen hours after the release, more than nine thousand square kilometers of land had been reclaimed. Yet, no single unit had reached the lunar colony. That was also highly unusual, but not unheard of: after all, not even one Terran day had passed and it was still a long way before the whole planet was ready for a new cycle. But Lagash, contrary to ‘that humanity’, could wait. And they could wait with her too.

The sixth hand triggered some levers, broadcast the data to the core. That ‘hole’ was an anomaly, one that hadn’t happened in the previous cycle – not so close to the Turn. That was highly unusual. Without the broadcast towers, without a perfect control on the satellites, guiding the swarm back was not possible. Better let it run wild, turn even more of that planet into ashes. A ‘hole’ of that size was barely consequential, nothing more than a blip. Even if ‘that humanity’ already found out about the ultrasound fallback, it was going to become useless as soon as the spires were rebuilt. It was a question of hours. Days, at most. The bombings couldn’t go on forever.

The primary brain looked at the map again, for the fleeting instant that it managed to return to the display. The second and third swarms were now too far. The first would have reached the ‘hole’ in around fifty to fifty-five hours.

An acceptable delay.

Two Terran days weren’t going to change anything.

As it always had been.

As it would always be.