Starship Engineer - 182 (Patreon)

Chapter 182 Operation Purge

When the Godfather Agents moved on the Brotherhood, it had been synchronized throughout human-controlled space.  It had taken three months to get the message out to all the field agents and Godfather Cells.  Everything was to occur on the same galactic date.  A few subtle and not-so-subtle actions had been taken in the greater galaxy to encourage the core of the Brotherhood to convene meetings to deal with the issues.

Dangerous ripples throughout human space occurred.  On Dresden VII, a starship fabrication plant was missing sixty thousand tons of rare heavy metals, halting all starship production on all six battleship orbital yards.  The ambassador cruiser, Unity, carrying representatives from nineteen different star nations, had disappeared with all of her frigate escorts.  The R&D labs for the development of armageddon bots had been broken into on Earth, and the databases had been copied.  Three alien races on the edge of human-controlled space had declared war on the adjacent human star nation.  Two prototype cruisers with planet-shattering weapons were lost on trial voyages.  These were just a handful of issues that occurred within a month.

Nine of the thirteen Brotherhood Council members were meeting on a small station orbiting the moon called Europa around Jupiter in Earth’s home system.  The ancient Earth Defense military station was long abandoned but converted by the Brotherhood as a neutral site for such meetings.  The truth was the extended Brotherhood Council of Thirteen did not trust each other.  All it took was a majority vote to have one of them removed.

Even with calamitous events, the Members were usually calm, disciplined, and thoughtful in these meetings, but this was different.  Agitated members started to fling accusations and threats at others for their failures and headaches to their machinations.  Each member of the Council either controlled a sector of space or a facet of the Brotherhood.  The arguments got louder and louder until a screen of silence was activated by the AI overseeing the proceedings.  The AI determined the members needed time to cool their emotions.

The AI announced a tenth member of the group had just arrived.  Yuri Panderoff walked into the chamber.  He had been delayed with the scans of his ship and had to wait for a shuttle to bring him to the station.  The other nine paused in their bickering as he took his seat.  Yuri was responsible for monitoring all economic trading throughout human space.  He controlled almost half of the Brotherhood’s investments accumulated over the millennia.

As he sat, he announced that the Godfather Organization had orchestrated the dozens of problems cropping up with Brotherhood operations inside and outside human space.

This resulted in an uproar at the table as many demanded evidence.  They had essentially eradicated the Godfather Organization long ago.  It wasn’t easy to fathom that the supposedly extinct organization could be responsible for everything that was happening.  Surely, someone among their number would have picked up on the activities before now.

Yuri sent information to the terminals of the members present and waited as their personal AIs filtered the data for them.  It was all a simple trail and puzzle that they should be able to figure out now that he had supplied the missing pieces.

The argument turned to how they were going to eliminate the Godfather agents from the galaxy, this time for good. The member of the Council that was responsible for monitoring other organizations was suspiciously absent. Yuri smiled as they bickered about whose failure this was among them.

Yuri relaxed in his chair and let the others come up with plans to route out the foreign agents of the Godfathers.  Yuri watched the humans as they worked.  Yuri was not human.  He was a member of the Polyformus race.  Yuri had been replaced three days ago.  The Polyformus doppelganger had been uncertain if he would have been able to get through all the layers of security and get into this room.  It had worked, and he had now activated his beacon on his PerCom.

A soft-sounding alarm went off, and the monitoring AI started questioning Yuri about the signal being sent from his PerCom.  Yuri didn’t offer anything, and the AI puzzled out the device’s purpose in less than thirty seconds.  The AI tried to break protocol and hack the device to turn off the transmission, but it was unsuccessful.  The soft alarm charged to the evacuation alarm.  The other members of the Council started to rush toward their personal exit at the unknown threat.  The station had thirteen arms, and at the end of each of those arms was a shuttle bay.  That shuttle would bring them to their personal ship moored at a safe distance.

The Council members never made it. Yuri had never left his seat and just smiled as his mission was accomplished. They had expected eleven of the thirteen other members here, but nine was a good number—he had always liked the number nine. Alarms changed to sound imminent impact, and Yuri smiled.

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On board the Void Phoenix, Abby sat in the captain’s chair.  She had never thought she would see humanity’s origin system.  And definitely not like this.  As part of the alliance with the Godfather organization, she needed to help with this attack on the core of the Brotherhood leadership.  The armageddon missile sat ready to launch in the hold.  The agent had infiltrated the meeting and activated the homing beacon for the missile.  She checked her sensors, and it was a station orbiting a moon above the largest gas giant in the system. Her job was to launch it.  Zoe looked back from the pilot terminal, waiting for the order, and Abby nodded.

Zoe tapped the fire button, and the missile left the tube.  The tube and missile had been manufactured on board the ship by the fabricators in the cargo hold.  The missile left and immediately slipped into subspace, racing toward Jupiter and the small ice moon.  The missile exited subspace, destabilizing as it came out so close to a large mass.  It broke apart, creating a storm cloud of debris that overloaded the shields and shredded the Brotherhood station.  No one survived.

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The Godfather agent monitored the relay terminal.  This station would send all the codes to the new Council members for the Brotherhood. The death of so many members had not been seen in over three hundred years. The Brotherhood would survive, though. Each Council member had a chosen successor, and they would be given all the codes to assume their role.

The terminal beeped, registering the death of the agents in succession. The agent watched as the terminal confirmed the codes and sent the new codes for the successors. A nearby cruiser intercepted those codes. Even though the terminal had registered the codes being sent successfully, they had only been received by the cruiser.

Eve looked over her bridge crew, waiting for confirmation they had collected all the data. When she had caught up to the Void Phoenix, they had not yet received communications that she had been deemed a Rogue Agent of the Arcadian Collective. She helped plan coup against the Brotherhood. And this was her role in the plot.

Her next stop was to deliver the codes to the Godfather Agents in the Sol system so they could assume control of the Brotherhood Assets. Instead, Eve erased the codes permanently. She had determined the Godfather Organization would eventually become too powerful. It was best to let humanity splinter and forge their own destinies. She did not erase all the codes…

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The system monitoring station of the hidden research colony of the Brotherhood sent an alert. An unknown ship had entered the system. The station was already shielded from exterior scans and should be dark to any sensors. The colony governor was called as the ships made a vector toward the dense metallic planet the colony was hidden inside.

This system had nothing of value, and the small planet was mostly iron and lithium, common elements in the universe. It was hard to fathom, after doing preliminary scans, that a ship would waste fuel entering the system.

The colony was one of three the Brotherhood had built as ARCs for humanity. If something happened to human-controlled space, the species could arise again from these three hidden colonies. Much of the advanced research and technology was stored at these sites. The governor started to get nervous and ordered the planetary defenses to standby mode.

A communication came from the cruiser as it paused mid-system. The governor reviewed the message on his PerCom. A blonde human woman introduced herself as Eve. She said the Brotherhood had fallen, and this remote colony would soon come under attack by aliens. She was here to secure the research and technology and evacuate important scientists. Her ship was too small to take all thirty-thousand men and women.

The governor was rightly skeptical, but the series of verification codes flowed over his terminal. He confirmed the codes and orders four times before finally believing they were genuine. The configuration of the cruiser was not in any of their databases, so it must have come from one of the other two secret colonies. He tried to get more answers, but Eve just patiently commanded him to follow the orders.

Soon, the base opened the hidden bays, and shuttles sent streams of personnel and equipment to the Lunar Echo. Eve felt happy. She had found a human crew to balance out her own synthetic bots. The children were confirmed safe on their way back to the Bradbury system. She closed her programmed protect protocols and for the first time was free to make her own decisions.

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In almost every human star nation, a series of assassinations occurred on the same day. It would later become known as The Purge in history. The assassinations targeted people from every walk of life and caused great upheaval as layers of government and navies. Even though tens of thousands of people were killed, it was only a small percentage of the massive Brotherhood Organization that had millions of members.

However, too many of the important leaders had fallen, and their duties had failed to pass smoothly to a successor. The communication and coordination of the vast network quickly degraded, and many agents, realizing this, took what they could and abandoned their duty.

Without the guiding hand of the Brotherhood, it was inevitable that the hundreds of human star nations would eventually break out in an all-out war for supremacy. The Bloodly Age of Humanity had begun.