Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Citizen404

ALL CITIZENS BE ADVISED, CURFEW BEGINS IN 35 MINUTES, PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR PLACE OF REDIDENCY.

ALL CITIZENS BE ADVISED CURFIEW BEGINS IN TEN MINUTES.

Eris stepped to the side of the sidewalk, keeping her head low under her hood as a set of peacekeepers passed by, their mechanical limbs whirring softly over the ground, their feet clattering with every step. Behind their partially opaque plastic face plates, she could see the glow of a single red light pulsing gently.

She could hear no thoughts, for there were none behind thick tangles of circuit and wire, when they passed by her she felt the cold absence of consciousness, the real people who controlled these constructs hidden away safely in their command centers. All around her other people did the same, passing to the side of the sidewalk to let the peacekeepers pass, their heads down their faces covered by hoods.

Red had really been a very poor color for the light behind the peacekeepers masks. Whoever designed them clearly did not know the psychological associations that were held within the human conscience after hundreds of years of robots portrayed in media. Either that or they did know exactly what they were doing.

Overhead the sky was only partially dark. Even though the sun was setting, the stars had not been visible for some time now.

Not with the Impetus sun hanging over them during the night.

The glowing orb was bright in the sky, not as bright as the sun but far brighter than the moon, and the circumstances of its appearance had been cause for great concern over the past months or so. With as bright as it was during the night, no other stars were visible on earth.

The night sky was dominated by a second sun, forcing the moon to relinquish the night.

The government had attempted to control the flow of information, to hide what lead to the events of the star's first appearance.

But with access to the internet, there was no way to stop people from finding out, not when the Europa and Martian colonies knew as much as they did.

Now everyone knew what had caused the Impetus Sun, regardless of weather the government wanted to know it or not.

Behemoth, an eldritch abomination of a thousand years and a million eyes had been detected bearing down upon the colonies of an Earth solar system, heading straight towards the human homeworld. No one had known what had happened at the time, but not hours after the star appeared causing near mass panic on a global scale, the information had been leaked past growing government sensortship.

The UNSC station at Europa rioted, and information on operations were dumped onto the internet, and accessed through illegal streaming sites, the Darknet, and videos were uploaded to Vidstream before being taken down by government hackers, though by then it was already too late.

Military documentation had been sifted through and read until the people came to their own conclusion.

At approximately 8:45 PM GMT Admiral Koslov of the UNSC fired two Thermonuclear warheads at the behemoth, the first ever firing of such weapons against a nonhuman entity in the history of earth. No change had been detected and the ship was almost overtaken when an unknown alien vessel appeared out of warp. The UNSC Europa station loses contact with Koslov and his ship as the new entity began firing weapons of unknown origin at Behemoth. These unknown weapons did more damage than thermonuclear weapons, but it was going slowly.

At 9:25 GMT contact was re-established with Koslov's vessel, and multiple others as. At 9:32 an explosion was detected, and Behemoth was destroyed. The alien vessel was nowhere to be found. All gravitational anomalies ceased. Contact with the ships was established only to learn that one of them was the stolen battle carrier once known as the UNSC Omen.