Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Unnamed

It had taken Several traitors several months to plot this coup. In all the galaxies, there was no place in Andromeda more secure than the the chambers of the Galactic Assembly on Irus. For thousands of years it had been built up as a monument to intergalactic power and cooperation made up with several separate and distinct layers of security.

Firstly, the entire solar system was protected by a network of deep space radar and targeting systems designed to vet anyone and everyone before they stepped within so much as a few lightyears of Irus. If those subspace targeting and weapons systems didn't work, there was always the ability to call up a squadron of D4 class fighters, at a moment's notice from any one of several space stations and mining colonies located in a strategic ring around the solar system. Though all the planets tended to exist on a flat disk around their star, there was still plenty of stations and patrolls in the uninhabited upper and lower segments of deep space.

Additionally Irus's three moons were outfitted with precision penetration Anti Space guns, with Nuclear capabilities, and an array of deep space targeting systems.

Assuming you could make it to Irus, There was, of course, the Irus defense Nexus, the technology having been granted to them by Emperor Celex when he first joined the GA. The technology was so far ahead of their current understanding of science, it might well have been magic. As far as anyone knew its advanced scanning systems could not be fooled. If you happened to make it through the defense nexus and into the atmosphere, you would be set upon by squadrons of unmanned ariel vehicles outfitted with missiles and advanced targeting systems. Rising out of the desert sands below, you would then have to contend with a battery of Ground to Air AA railguns, given to Irus as a recent courtesy by their human counterparts.

Not only that but this included Air to Air batteries from floating platforms that dotted the skies around Irus.

The city was crawling with guards, and shielding. Cameras were everywhere.

To even make it inside the GA headquarters as an employee took several years of vetting and security clearances. The Chairwoman's direct guard detail had been implanted with tracking devices, that might go off at any moment and kill them immediately if determined by a series of top secret monitoring drones manned by unknown nameless and faceless individuals vetted so secretly that only the chairwoman and one other person knew who they were.

This just went to prove how successful Kazna had been in corrupting their system.

Somehow she had managed to influence those at the highest levels of government, and those closest to the chairwoman. Even as her body was consumed by the strange injection, she watched, as two of her guards walked silently through the double doors and out into the hallway.

For her own guards to be compromised, it meant that their GPS guardian had also been compromised, probably several of them.

The chairwoman didn't compromise them, so that must have meant that her second had betrayed her. The network of lies and betrayal it would take to do this was astounding. The corruption ran deep into the body of her government, a cancer that bore a hole into the body of everything that she cared about and had fought for.

After all these years,

How could it have ended like this?

At the far end of the room, the two double doors opened, and the Chairwoman watched as several of her own guards bowed, heads lowered for the churning wall of blackness that stood just beyond the door. The darkness was so great it was almost incomprehensible, less an absence of light and more as if the light had never existed,

And from it, stepped general Kazna.

Well over nine feet tall, she had to duck beneath the doorway to avoid scraping the horns of her helmet against the frame. A billowing black cape swirled around her body, twisting and unfurling like smoke, the shadow concealing parts of her body only to refocus moments later.