Humanity Endures

Part 4 - The Beginning of the End | Chapter 2

The endlessly ornate personal chamber that Lassarha owned did little to bring her comfort. Eyeing the gilded, wooden table before her, while being utterly overcome by emotion, Lassarha decided that it had no business being in one piece. Closing her bare hand into a fist, she brought her furious arm down onto the helpless piece of furniture, cleaving it in two and sending its splinters soaring throughout her room; any particles of wood that found a home in Lassarha's unarmored face were quickly removed by her Tekran physiology, doing nought but drawing a few droplets of her purple blood. The stinging sensation of her insignificant facial wounds, the sight of her own blood, and that of the shattered item of furniture before her, nonetheless helped ease the rage of Lassarha, whose horrible day had begun with her political reputation being obliterated by a framing after a failed assassination attempt, and had ended with an alien invasion that cost her planet over four hundred thousand warships, and many more lives. If there was a silver lining to the deathly hurricane that Lassarha was trapped in, she did not see it.

All of these lost warships had been destroyed over the alien skies of Light's End; so far, the planet of Tehkria — where Lassarha had arrived a few hours prior — had gone unharmed. This may have seemed like a boon, but not only was the aliens' ignorance bound to change, and not only did Lassarha have far fewer warships available to deal with that issue than she would like, but she was simultaneously dealing with not one, but two separate conspiracies within the Empire. Worse still, Lassarha could not effectively target either of these conspiracies when she was so politically isolated, and defending her planet also became more difficult when she had few friends willing or capable of lending aid when they themselves were busy dealing with alien incursions. In fact, Tehkria had already dispatched a significant portion of its fleets to safeguard some of its immediate, less-defended neighbors — Lassarha's ploy to win back some political support, and save some lives — but she had begun to regret her choice, as Tehkria seemed ever more likely to come under alien attack, and it had only half the number of ships it had started the day with. Lassarha considered the idea that one of her two conspiracies would try to strike at her, but she ruled that unreasonable: to attack a human world when the Alien War had just begun seemed unbelievably stupid, even for someone who was stupid enough to cross her.

The first conspiracy, which stemmed from the attempted assassination of Cehlarxan, was costing Lassarha valuable allies in a time of crisis; this was clearly detrimental to Tehkria, and the galaxy at large, though somehow it was the less unnerving of the two. The second, which had gone relatively unnoticed by the denizens of the galaxy, was perhaps even more ominous than the first: the Military Council had, less than an hour after the catastrophe over Light's End, published both a brief tactical manual on how to deal with alien fleets and infestation, and had distributed blueprints for an alien biology detector. These seemed like natural responses to such a crisis, except for the fact that the alien detector had been distributed to some factories before the alien fleet had even appeared over Light's End. The brief manual and tactics, concise as it was, had also been released far too quickly, and contained far-too-thorough insights on the foe, when one considered the recent date of the aliens' arrival — some may have attributed this to the alacrity of the military bureaucracy, though Lassarha knew this to be impossible from experience, even in the Empire. No bureaucracy was that good, and even while most of Lassarha's senior advisors blamed her musings on overactive imagination coupled with unhealthy suspicion, Lassarha herself, convinced of the truth, deliberated how and if she would deal with this second case of conspiracy. Indeed, those first few facts about the Council alone would have made many people suspicious, but, of course, there was more.

Before Light's End had even revealed its true nature, Tehkria's intelligence agency had done some illegal intelligence gathering within the Empire's federal espionage ministry, attempting to glean some information that could politically benefit Lassarha. In doing so, her ministry had detected traces of an event labelled "The Inexorable Incident" being mentioned with alarming frequency by members of the Military Council. Of all the ships to bear that name, the only one to ever be engaged in suspicious activity was an Executive Command frigate, commissioned a number of years ago and captained by one Kaeliaxa, that had allegedly been destroyed by the black hole of Light's End after the vessel's gravity nullifier failed. Though a minor and plausible-seeming incident, this story was placed in doubt by the fact that the expeditionary fleet discovered that the "black hole" of Light's End was not a black hole at all, and that Light's End had served as the means through which the alien ships had entered the Milky Way made this "incident" all the more darkly interesting to those aware of it. No doubt, some in the Military Council, acting like the helpful, open people they were, had been hiding important information from the rest of the galaxy, though what the information was, or even what subject it concerned, would no doubt prove endlessly difficult to discern. Indeed, though most planetary consuls spied on the Empire's espionage ministry in hopes of gaining an information advantage over their peers, Lassarha's own investigation had the potential to make her a traitor and conspirator in the eyes of the law — if these eyes were not blind to her acts. This was exacerbated by the fact that Lassarha and her world's espionage ministry were already fully occupied dealing with the other conspiracy that had wracked the Tekran government — the one that had attempted to kill Cehlarxan and had succeeded in framing Lassarha — and, at times, Lassarha herself was occupied by the minor task that was running a planet during wartime. There was so much treason and so little time; the crises that Lassarha faced were so numerous that the alien invasion sometimes seemed like an afterthought.