Sneak Peek - Interrupt: Revolution (Patreon)

SPOILER WARNING: This Interrupt won't be posted until around Chapter 18, and as a result, it alludes to certain things that haven't come up in the story yet. I have done my best to select an excerpt that minimizes that, but if you want to remain unsullied, then go no further. For those who do, please be considerate of those that don't want to, or don't know about this part. Good? Good.

This Interrupt is a sizable one, and this scene comes about a third of the way through it, where Admiral Jericho and his senior officers have made a decision, and one that will shape the course of Nibiru civilization.

~

“I wish there was another option,” Werner said heavily. “I wish to God there was. We’ve lived with these people for a full generation!”

“That doesn’t matter,” Combs told him. “You’re still Earthers, still outsiders and unbelievers. Just by existing, you’ve inflamed discord that had almost faded away. You’ve taken the power out of the Prophet’s hands,” she paused, her lips twisting in a grimace. “Or out of the hands of those who say they speak for him. You’re a threat to all that they’ve built up and all their...” the disdain turned repulsed and angry. “Plans,” she finished. “They’ll never let that go.”

“She’s right,” Jericho confirmed. “They’ve still never forgiven us for what happened to their scout.” It was luck that Convoy 519 crossed paths with one of the handful of deep-range scouts that Nibiru had launched, but not quite as much of a coincidence as it might look. The refugee convoys had been been given orders to rendezvous at specific systems – Assembly, Gather, Muster, Rally – and a set of contingency orders should their destination be compromised. Five-One-Nine’s destination had been Muster. Along with the flagship, they’d lost a third of their number and more than half of their people when they’d arrived at Muster only to find it ‘compromised’. The contingency orders had been bleakly direct: run. Run until you can’t run any more.

The convoy’s route had been selected back on astronomical surveys, past explorations and even historical records going back to the earliest days of the Confederacy. As it turned out, the selection criteria for a convoy desperately fleeing their species’s genocide wasn’t too far different from a colony of isolationists. Still, space was very big and the odds were good that the refugee fleet would never have known about Nibiru had they not encountered one of their scouts.

That first meeting had... not gone terribly well. Words were exchanged between the Nibiru craft and the Confederates. Words, and then missiles. The scout’s crew were killed, but their databanks had been recovered intact and pointed the way to salvation for the thousands of survivors aboard the fleet.

An ugly moment and not one that any of the Confederate had been proud of, but they’d been desperate and as the saying went... desperate people did desperate things. No, not a proud moment at all but it had saved a lot of lives... and injected a sour note into the Confederates’ relations with their long-lost cousins. One that, even decades later, the Nibiru people hadn’t forgotten.

If Jericho were being honest with himself, neither side had done their best to get along with the others. The Earthers had a reputation for being high-handed and arrogant in dealing with their ‘provincial’ cousins and routinely cast the Confederacy’s shadow over the way the locals did things, or outright trivializing the separatists’ experiences, even in impolitic or simply inappropriate ways.

On the other side of the coin, the Nibiru were suspicious and resentful of the Confederates; they’d left human space to get away from Earth only to have their vagabond cousins drop into their laps and they didn’t at all care for the influx of ‘unbelievers’ into their society, nor how the trio of Confederate warships had at first outclassed everything in the Nibiru Navy. New ships were under construction, including the vanity project Pridwen.

Well, Jericho caught himself. That wasn’t quite fair. Pridwen was going to be the new flagship of the Nibiru Navy and there was nothing particularly egregious or gratuitous about its design, but he doubted that it was a coincidence that it was going to be bigger than Archura.

That was just a symptom, though – Nibiru was trying to swing the pendulum back the other way. They wanted things to go back to how they’d had them. Jericho could understand that. He didn’t understand their veneration of Siegland, nor did he agree with the marginalization of any Nibiru who didn’t toe that ideological line, but he could understand why they wanted to keep the society they’d tried to build on the path they’d set for it.

He’d once thought coexistence was not only possible, but inevitable. Both sides would learn to live with each other. They both just need more time to acclimate to one another. The Confederacy was gone and the Earthers had to acknowledge that. They couldn’t rebuild their own civilization on top of another one, especially not one that was born from resisting that very thing. Likewise, the Nibiru believers would have to accept that they couldn’t control everything they way they wanted to. Just like they refused to submit to one government, they’d learn that that same stubborn revolutionary spirit was still present in those who didn’t want to follow the Prophet Siegland’s teachings.

Instead, a Rubicon had been crossed. Coexistence was impossible, and Jericho knew that he was the one that was going to strike first, a decision that would kill millions of innocent people.

May God forgive us.