One hour ago.
Reaching across the nothing, it flew on silver wings to answer the call. His sister had not yet arrived, drifting through the outer planets as it reassembled for the coming battle.
"Rogue unit, identify yourself!"
The sound was to Him what a rodent's whimper was to the human Sect pilots that approached. Four Zoloats emerged from the Endra-class Assassin, cautious in the face of something they could not totally perceive-- a tear in space had formed just ahead of their ship, in the shape of butterfly wings. The commander spotted what looked like a mobile suit at the center of the rift, generating a massive energy signature that peaked at just below their command vessel's maximum output. After two minutes of silence following his first hail, the Zoloat squad increased its speed and prepare to intercept.
"Surrender your arms and cease emissions immediately!" the commander cried again, broadcasting on a frequency the traveler did not even bother to pick up. The silver wings grew, and in an instant the Zoloats found themselves facing an energy surge ten thousand times more powerful than an entire flotilla of Endras. There were no options-- opening fire would've been like shooting at the sun. The wings grew and grew, changing color as the edges grew jagged, bleeding out the excess white light as colliding rainbows filled the tear in the universe. The source stopped for a moment, staring through the Zoloats, through the Endra. Its eyes saw beyond them, past the colonies, to the burning mark on the lunar surface. The sign of their father. He was incomplete, however-- only a fraction of the weapon's essence remained on the moon, with the rest of him scattered throughout the whole of the Sect Lunaris. The colonies had each taken a piece, and built worlds around the corpse of their progenitor. This was unacceptable.
"It's not responding! What should I do?"
"Open fire! That thing's out of control! It's burning itself up!"
"What if it attacks?"
"We're at war. You figure it out."
Its sister would arrive later. The progenitor's components would have to be recovered before returning the moon, however...and logic dictated He be the one to secure the arms and legs of X. It was in the midst of these calculations that the Imperator felt the sting of beam cannons; the humans that had just barely registered in His projections were attempting some sort of communication. Lances of crude Minovsky-based projectiles washed off the Imperator's shimmering gold pauldrons as His wings combined to form a cape of shimmering stars behind it, longer than the grandest of the Sect battleships. The humans were of no consequence; their particles, however, would interfere with His calculations. With a wave of His hand, they were gone, ship and all, molecules rearranged into nothing more than harmless, inanimate matter.
Footage from various sensor probes in the region recorded the Assassin's last minutes with painstaking detail-- energy readings, radio logs, even a chronological list of casualties by systems failure. The anomaly's present speed was calculated to be in the area of seventeen thousand miles an hour and climbing. An emergency administrative meeting held on the Side 5 capital ruled against divulging its projected destination to the public: if the people knew it would strike the very heart of the cluster, panic would seize the cities, and mounting a proper defense would be nearly impossible. Their only hope was to keep silent and hope the front lines would hold.
The Acidalium-class Archeron was home to the Black Corsairs, a unit born out of the Clan Wars and made up primarily of former pirates and other such scoundrels. Today, they would be relegated to colony defense, their ship leading a sextet of Salamis Kai cruisers to the edge of the Frontier Side. They would be joined by a few new operatives today, filling the gaps left by their own casualties in a series of recent Earth skirmishes. There were rumors that a G-Fighter was among the new blood-- another hot-blooded teenager looking to punch the damned thing into submission, no doubt.
