War Command Cruiser 5 lumbered toward the inner planets of the fringe G2 star system they'd recently arrived in. Only a handful of years a year ago, a picket ship had followed the last known armored warrior into the stargate that led there. After only a few months of preparation, War Command Cruiser 5 — stationed in the same system as the picket had been — followed it through the same stargate, before the picket's trip had even completed. They'd emerged on this new end of the stargate mere days ago. If the automated news beacon was to be believed, the picket ship had sent the armored warrior careening down into the atmosphere of the largest inner planet. If the force of the ship's weapons hadn't killed him, the aerobraking heat and the impact with the planet's rocky surface surely would have. Per procedure, the picket ship had left a news beacon in the star system which repeated this information to any ship of the 27 Empire that arrived after it, then departed through the same stargate it had entered.
Triumph over the Homeworld, at last. This was what War Command Cruiser 5 now had to confirm.
Nestled deep inside the enormous rectanguar spacecraft, its command center bustled with activity. "Bustled" was a relative term, of course. To human eyes, the six-armed creatures manning it would have seemed lethargic, even slothlike in their every movement; but they moved with deliberate purpose. At their center, crouched on a dais to emphasize his importance, one of the 27 Empire's few High Mandarins lorded over his crew.
"Have you detected any hint of him?" the High Mandarin asked in his high-pitched, chirping language.
"Not from this distance, so far," the second-in-command replied. Two of his six tentacle arms made fine adjustments to one of the instruments. "I don't really expect to find any even after we close in. Armor Attack Ship 875 put him out of action and knocked him down from orbit at the same time. That one-two punch must have killed him. The news beacon says he hit the planet's atmosphere at over thirty times its speed of sound; not even homeworld energy-armor can protect anything from that much re-entry heat, and he was still supersonic when he hit the ground!"
"Hmmm . . . maybe. But Armor Attack Ship 875 left an automated probe behind, and that probe picked up high-speed, singular life energy emissions — the type characteristic of personal armor fields. If he really was the last armored warrior, we'd better make sure nothing went wrong."
"Well, I still don't think —"
A scanner reading cut him short. The concentration of life energy at a particular point had just tripled; energy-armor was in use near the large rocky planet's surface. Two of his arms momentarily forgot to be tense, and flopped down by his sides; but he spurted back into action and engaged the pinpointing equipment.
"There he is, sir! I don't believe it, but he's still alive. He's below the cloud level. His flight speed is rather low considering the atmospheric and gravitational conditions."
"Then we've found him." The High Mandarin made a gripping gesture with the tentacle-fingers of his upper-left hand. "But why didn't he leave, since he knew this would be the first place we'd look?"
"There is highly evolved intelligent life down there. They even appear to have an electric-level technology."
Several features around the High Mandarin's eyes hardened: he was deeply angered. "How long have you known about this?!" he demanded.
This caught the second-in-command off-guard. "It, uh, showed up in our scans an hour-and-a-half ago."
"And you didn't tell me immediately?!" the High Mandarin said.
The second-in-command withdrew. "It just . . . didn't seem important at the time."
"It is important, you insubordinate fool!" the High Mandarin snapped. "If he's met a technological race, he could probably teach them how to build a space armada. Now, we have to destroy not only an armored warrior, but an entire intelligent species! We have to start a whole new round of preparations now. This would never have happened if I'd been informed of the armored warrior's precise condition and what kind of planet he was orbiting."
"Sorry, sir; but I can't take the responsibility. Procedures dictate we're supposed to complete the scans before we hand the results up the chain of command, so that decisions aren't based on incomplete information."
"No, no," the High Mandarin sighed, calming down, "I'm not blaming you. I'm just disappointed that we have to do this at all. We might have left this new species alone to grow, let them mature, who knows? Maybe we could even have subsumed them into the 27 Empire in a few centuries. But now? With access to Homeworld technology, they're too much of a threat. We have to exterminate them." He let a couple of silent breaths go by. "It looks like such a nice world, too. I see the armored warrior's strategy in choosing which planet to orbit when Armor Attack Ship 875 closed in. But it doesn't make any difference now." He glanced furtively around his command center, reveling in the array of ship systems at his disposal. "At least he'll die seeing the 27 Empire in its full fury."
The first officer punched in a few commands on his console, and watched his display. Their distance to the blue-green world slowly dwindled.
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