The Devastion Arch is an alternate series of events crafted by Ghosts of Antipode members Mercurial and Maestro. Although this is not cannon (official) material and somewhat hard to follow at times, it remains one of the greatest pieces of StarSiege fanfiction literature ever written.
Date: December 2642
Death. It was palpable. As she sniffed the stale, sulfur-tainted air, she shuddered despite the stifling heat.
People had died here. Beyond that, even: everyone here had died. They lasted so long, so many futile years. As the Cybrids blocked off the planet, they fought, not against the mechanical monsters, but against each other as their food and air and water dwindled. This place was the last to die: Sa Thauri. Carved on a bulkhead in jagged letters: "The toughest rathole on Venus." Scratched elsewhere, in smaller, shallower letters: "I am the last."
And beside that haunting message, a crumbling mound of acid-eaten flesh that had once been a human being.
She looked around, at the shattered interior bulkheads. She had managed to repair the outer shell for this building, a heat dispertion tower. The spines of the microwave emitters would never again do their job of sending the world's heat back into space, but the shell was intact, and her fragile bubble of near-vacuum (as Venus's standards went) would last as long as the repaired seals held.
She wondered how long she would need to stay here, how long before the Emperor was crowned and secure enough in his position he would not consider her a threat.
Or, at the very least, until he decided she was dead.
An Immortal's memory was rather longer than the proverbial elephant's, so she was resigned to a very long residence on this graveyard of a world.
But how long could anyone live on a dead world, surrounded by the ghosts of a planetful of destroyed human lives? How long before the silence would drive one utterly, irretrievably mad?
It was a question she dearly hoped she would not have to find the answer to.
Sa Thauri was a small cluster of various buildings set on large platforms. The Venusian architectural style of tall buildings on platforms and wide buildings on the ground lent a spidery appearence to the arcology. This arcology, unlike many on Venus, was still in more or less one piece. Though the structures were scorched and some of them were acid-eaten, they still stood tall, defying the hostile elements. The same could not be said for many of the others, where the proud miniature cities were now little more than slag heaps.
She studied the screen where the video feed from her Banshee was being downloaded. Siren sat resting in between two structures that were once gathering halls, sheltered from the worst of the easterlies that ripped at the planet's surface. Out on the surface without shielding from the wind, the small, discshaped vehicle would quickly be rolled end-over-end over the ground until it was ripped apart. And losing her transport off this rock was something she did not, most emphatically did not, want to contemplate.
Besides, bringing the small fighter in through the Oberwind's turbulance had been hellish enough; it would be just too disgustingly ironic for it to shred itself after it reached the ground.
The wind moaned over the two-meter-thick metal shell of the structure, with the sound of the roar of water through a river or perhaps the voices of Venus's million dead. She closed her eyes and forced the ghosts away. She would need to practice that if she had any intention of remaining sane here for any length of time.
And now that she had completed her repairs for the time being, she desperately needed something to do.
Exploration of Venus might be interesting, assuming she could ressurrect any of the vehicles in the still-intact hangar. Of course, the long, lonely walks between one place and another would not be much relief to her boredom.
Her eye again caught the scratches on the wall. In the last days, it seemed the Venusians had devoted their efforts into preserving what they could of their struggle, for posterity, or perhaps for lack of anything better to do. She had no doubt that somewhere in the city there were archives, many of them, set aside for the day humans returned to Venus, whenever that may be.
She studied the nearby scratches on the wall. The slashing zigzags of Japanese ideographics drew silver crosshatches along the nearest part of the wall. She studied the crosshatches, wishing she knew some written Japanese. She had learned a fair amount of spoken Japanese (and other languages) over the years, but she had never so much as seen Japanese characters before much less read them.
She ran her fingers along the scratches, until she found one that was different. It was what appeared to be a diagram of the dispertion tower, with a small, deeply-scratched icon in the center, on one of the lower levels. Though she could not read the text, the implication was clear: something important was there.
The icon had a few angled arrows pointing from it to various bits of the text around it. She experienced a moment of frustration as the unknown characters taunted her. She memorized the position, turned away from the wall, and went to locate the ladderway leading to the indicated level.
It turned out to be in the building's core, cut off by bulkheads at every deck. She climbed down the dark ladderway, hearing the clang of her footsteps on hollow metal bars, seeing the faint light from above trickling down through the grilles and catwalks in the tunnel.
Navigating this labyrinth of metal she finally reached the bottom five minutes later, and opened the door to the basement level that had been on the map.
She stopped dead in the doorway, her eyes widening briefly, then dropping with respectful sorrow. It was a crypt.
By the arrangement of the bodies, the crypt was not the work of the last survivors working to bury their dead. The bodies were arranged in cicles, hands linked, with the children in the center. The macabre scene was completed by the body of a single child, barely more than a toddler, in the very center, hands clasped around a box.
Mercifully, the bodies were sufficiently destroyed by the vicious, acidic atmosphere that they were unrecognizable, that she was not forced to look into the faces of the city's dead. Or, at least, not more than their skulls. Jellied flesh had dripped from acid-holed bone, leaving piles of blackened mush in puddles around the collapsed skeletons.
She stepped through the circle careful not to step in any of the gruesome remains, lifted the box, and opened it.
Inside was a sheet of metaplas with white writing on it, in English, Japanese, and German. She read the English section, her heart sinking lower with each word.
"We the surviving residents of Sa Thauri arcology, in light of the destruction of our world at the hands of the Cybrids, have elected to end our lives on this day, to spare ourselves and our children the slow, painful end that will soon fall when our last supplies run out. The vote by all the adults and children over the age of five, cast by sealed ballot on the twenty-third of January, 2624, was ninety-seven for the proposal and seven against. The seven will remain in the arcology for as long as they are able and so desire, and they have agreed not to disturb us until such time as we can be returned to Earth for burial.
For us, we go to our fate with resignation but not fear or anger. We have fought, and we have lost, and we have died. And so we accept our fate and move on, to whatever lies ahead.
To whomever finds this document, we only ask three things. One, that the arrangements be made to transport our remains back to Earth, as described in further detail in this archive. Two, that the archive, which contains our diaries, our logs, and the art we have created during these long years, be taken to Earth and be placed in the Omniweb as a memorial to us. And three, that Sa Thauri be rebuilt above us when humanity returns to Venus. Do not shun this place and waste this sacrifice; take what we were able to save and use it to build again.
Farewell..."
She dropped the sheet back into the box, her hands shaking, a quiet sob emerging from the back of her throat. The box fell from her trembling hands, falling with a quiet thud on the hard metal of the deck. The archive, a small, heavily-armored computer system, fell out of the box, along with a small package in a metaplas wrapper.
When she finally looked down at the spilled objects, she picked up the package. It had three pouches, and they were labeled, "RED", "BLACK", and "YELLOW".
She felt the small, round shapes inside, frowned, carefully opened the one labeled "BLACK".
Small, dried orange fruit lay inside the bag. She pulled one out, and turned it over in her fingers.
Roses.
She placed the fruit back into the package and resealed it.
Even as they went to their deaths, the Sa Thaurians had hope. They believed that one day roses would bloom again in this city that was now their grave.
She placed them in her pocket and determined to plant them as soon as possible, in the hydroponics bay. She would have to do a lot of rebuilding, but it was a task she would accept gladly, for the sake of these brave men and women and (dear God) children.
