Armageddon Waits For No One

The Prime Beacon near-collided with Ni-6 as they rounded opposite corners. He reached down and steadied the younger man while dragging him along. Ni-6 could hardly edge in a word with the amazing hustle and whirl surrounding them.

Servicemen were running left, right, and center, dashing across hallways and dragging with them anything and everything. Some tugged or pushed carts along, piled high with chips or other material. Some of those rushing by halted in their tracks to avoid colliding with them; he appreciated that even with all the chaos, their awareness was well off to the point they could pick him out of the crowd.

His HUD flared in his ears with more messages. Ch-4, In-3, Eighth Headman, the other headmen, his head generals, and others. Though they all barraged him from different angles, every message related to one thing: the Aud. Always the damn Aud, no matter what.

He considered punching every wall he ran by, to release some of the nerves he carried. At his side, Ni-6, with frantic energy, flicked from one part of his screen to another, no doubt under a similar burden from all the underlings that answered to him.

They made their way down to the Chamber of Meet in record time, where they found most of the people sending them an endless flood of messages congregating in the greeting space. The situation was too pressing for the Directory to set aside time for the headmen to follow decorum and file everyone into the inner chamber to open another session.

The rest of the headmen huddled in a loose circle far off to the right. Upon seeing him, In-3 waved him over. "Took you long enough! What part of the clear urgency contained in my communication evaded you?"

"I didn't listen to any of them, I came straight here." Even then, he might've avoided In-3's out of pettiness. He turned to the others. "Are our present circumstances dire?"

"That's one way to frame the matter." Eighth Headman had the gall to look cheeky even then, batting her eyes under the collective glares of the rest. He and the Third Headman were the only two to abstain from such activity, more used to her interesting form of stress management. "The drones your ray has been throwing beyond the walls weren't sitting idle while we waited for more information following Rhea's fall."

Another three weeks came and went, and though the One-Light Directory prepared for every eventuality within its power, there wasn't a need yet. There hadn't been a single Aud sighting to sound the alarm to in a long time. "Nine hours ago, one of the drones to the south recorded a heat signature too large to be a human." Not that there would be a surviving human down there, to begin with.

Barring the Ancheros, Flux Monolith, and Dervish's Gale and their unknown fates, the rest of the Titans the First remained in contact with heeded the recall and returned to the Last Light. Some, for the first time in decades.

Others hadn't been within ten kilometers of the walls in over a century, and now they were sharing the patrol route of the Halo Beast. The defender of the city hadn't changed its course in all its time, and its crew didn't mind the extra help with their never-ending duty.

"After that first sighting, it only took three hours for the rest of the four cardinal directions to yield a similar sighting. First the west, then the north, and the east coming last. And the number of heat signatures multiplied fast." Sixth Headman shivered.

Though he and Eighth Headman were the extent of their number to express their unease, the Prime Beacon never doubted the others were under a similar pressure boring them into a rising pit of despair. Each fought to hold back their own.

"There wasn't any pre-warning. Since then, we've counted thousands from every direction, fast approaching. And that's only what we could equate as the vanguard. We don't know the tier demographics yet, since you used cheap materials and components to speed the construction and deployment times of the drones made for this task. But we can be sure that if the Aud are beginning to show their intelligence without reserve, the hordes will organize themselves so that there will at least be blue Aud present." Or purple. Or...

"We should remember the attack on Io," rumbled the Ninth Headman. "It isn't of a smaller probability that there might be many more Aud advancing toward the Last Light via the cavern roof, instead of the ground."

"My people already presented to me a solution for that." Nobody asked for elaboration, which was quaint, as the Sixth Headman wouldn't provide it. It pleased the Prime Beacon that even now the other man respected their agreement. "They're moving the final products into their foundations now and should have results to report within seven hours."

"What about the communication dead zones?" The Prime Beacon set back his shoulders.

"Some analysts in my ray examined the Jackal's recordings and data taken during Rhea's final chapter and determined that Rhea suffered under a similar phenomenon to what Serviceman Pa-5 described. There's probable reason to accept this; both forts never established communications to warn us, even though even if their transmission towers suffered irreparable damages, the ones in the city are more than advanced enough to bridge the gap."

"We lack a basic understanding of what this 'communication dead zone' is, never mind what causes it or its effects on our communication methods or the environment in general." The Sixth Headman pinched his nose. "Mmm…without so much as a theoretical framework to base our work on, my ray's time would be better spent elsewhere, as much as it pains me to admit it."

"There's still a chance our communication systems could bridge the gap the forts' could not," Ch-4 reasoned. "The reality may be more limited in scope than a complete shutdown of our long-range communications. And should this be the case, we can erect a series of spotlights throughout the Last Light, from its walls to the sides of its tallest ceilingscrapers, to communicate across the city with little delay."

She glanced at him. "If I'm not mistaken, the First teaches its servicemen exotic communication methods during their compulsory service, including morse and binary. Seeing as how these 'dead zones' only affected communication technologies, others falling outside communicators, modules, HUDs, and screens should be fine."

Eighth Headman leaned down to pinch Ch-4's cheek. "Look at you: cute, and smart too!"

"Please, contain your divergent urges for a minute!" In-3 was less accepting of the sudden interruption--and though he agreed with him, the Prime Beacon would never admit it by backing the man's opinion.

He performed well in pressing his consternation at her actions from the forefront of his mind and looked across the gathering to the Third Headman, asking a question the Prime Beacon prepared to voice himself: "Is there any chance of the civilian population learning of the coming Aud…army?"

The word didn't sound right in the same sentence as 'Aud', but they couldn't continue to treat large congregations of the creatures as instinct-driven hordes anymore.