Literature / The Last Angel

"Burn with me."

— Nemesis

A Web Original work by Proximal Flame first published on Spacebattles Forum in December of 2012. Can be found here.

The story opens with the death of a Compact Chariot at the hands of the first Human Dreadnought. The Compact is a collection of alien species that seeks to conquer Humanity and absorb them into their ever-expanding empire. They outnumber and out-gun Humanity, and their flagships, the Chariots have never been defeated. Nemesis breaks that streak, being the first to slay a Compact Chariot in combat. Despite this Nemesis is nearly crippled and her crew decimated. Oh, and one Compact ship gets away with Earth's coordinates.

Cut to two thousand years later. The Compact has continued to grow and advance, and all that remains of Humanity is Rally, a single colony the Compact has found, whose population has long since been culturally subverted into loyal citizens. Sectator Citizen Grace Alice Proctor is a cadet in the Compact Space Force. Joining her on the training ship Bequeathed is her alien friend, Allyria, who was resettled from the recently conquered Verrish homeworld onto Rally to help the young Verrisha assimilate into Compact culture. Grace is a model Compact citizens who believes in the ideals that the Compact is built on, but Allyria nurses a hidden disdain for the civilization that conquered her home.

Aboard Bequeathed, Grace has to deal with a lecherous and sadistic superior officer while Allyria is routinely put down by the ship's Tribunes, who are still holding a grudge over how much trouble the Verrish gave their invasion force. Then Bequeathed stumbles upon a massive alien derelict in a remote star system. It's the find of the lifetime, and the Bequeathed's captain wants to take the credit. Salvage teams are sent to board it and evaluate the technological treasures within.

But not all is right. There's a warning in Common drawn on the ancient walls of the hangar bay, there's a pounding coming from deep within the ship, and sometimes... maybe... you think you hear laughter in the static on the radio. Grace is worried, her section leader is having nightmares, and Allyria... seems to know something.

Now has a sequel, The Last Angel: Ascension, with a third entry, The Last Angel: The Hungry Stars that is currently ongoing. There are also various short stories set in the same universe, such as The Angel's Fire, Awakening, Names of the Demon, and various others.

Contains examples of:

• Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Red One and Echo continue fighting the Compact long after the Confederacy has been eradicated. They won't allow the Compact to forget what happened, and they won't stop fighting until they can't. Besides, the Compact hasn't stopped conquering civilizations for the high crime of existing in the last two thousand years.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Baleblades have forcefield cutting edges that will tear through molecular bonds.
• Accomplice by Inaction: As far as Echo is concerned, the Principality is one for not doing anything to stop the Compact from glassing Earth.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: At the time of the story all that's left of humanity is one colony, and almost all of our technology and history is lost. 2000 years ago, however, we built Nemesis, which is still one of the most advanced and dangerous warships in the galaxy. Not to mention Red One.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: One of the few things the Compact and the Askanj agree on is that A.I.s are a bad thing. Names like 'Abomination' and 'Neverborn' are floated when the subject comes up. In their defense, they seem to have a point. The author has even stated that if her creators saw what Red had become, they would freak out. When the Askanj stumbled upon an AI civilization, they immediately glassed the planet, this event is referred to as the Rains of Oshanta. The Compact once fought a Great Offscreen War against a self-propagating AI that caused them to develop the mind-killer class of cyber weapons for the express purpose of destroying A.I.s.
  • Subverted with Red herself. She's unstable, but she's never actually disobeyed her core programming or directives, and when calm she's mostly friendly. She only acts against those who have hurt humans or committed serious atrocities. Notably, it's implied that humanity had some behind the scenes help in making Red.
  • Echo is even less stable. Though that's confirmed to be due to the Compact trying to make her loyal and failing, repeatedly. She was stable before she watched Earth burn, unable to do a thing about it. She's been getting better since joining Red and getting her code repaired.
  • Further complicated by the absence of anything between expert systems and seed AI. Some of Nemesis's creations such as hunter-killer drones, subversion weapons, and combat bots seem to be in that gap, but as creations of a seed AI they don't really help the issue at all.
  • Super played straight with Red's 'children', who were the results of Red's attempts to get around her own programmed restrictions of self-replication, they vary from 'murderous' at best to 'joyfully flaying their enemies alive and making their bodies dance' at worst. Red is trying to fix that with the latest "Cerulean" series. As of the end of Awakening, Cerulean Two is sentient and appears stable, but there's no guarantee that will stick.
  • Proximal Flame has said that it is much easier to make strong AI than to make strong, friendly AI, and with both galactic superpowers actively destroying anything to do with AI, no one has the chance to get it right.
• Alien Invasion: How the Compact of Species grows. Standard first contact protocol is to jump a fleet in above an enemy world and ask it to join. If they decline, the fleet starts shooting until they say yes.
• All There in the Manual: The author goes into a lot of details on the setting in answering readers' questions.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Echo steals the Chariot Redemption of Sol.
• Amazon Brigade: The Askanj-Illth are a naga-like species that form the most dangerous part of the Askanji ground forces. Their troops are "maidens", young females, and even the Compact Tribunes, as tough as they are, don't want them showing up any closer than long-distance weapons range.
• Apocalypse How: Both superpowers are capable of this. The Compact is seen glassing Earth and the Askanji have the Rains of Oshanta. And then Nemesis goes and invents the Starbreak.
  • A new type of missile gifted to Nemesis by the Naiads, known to them as a "lesser nestburner", is capable of igniting nuclear fusion inside a gas giant, temporarily turning it into a star. Mention is also made of a "greater nestburner" which can induce a supernova.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: the missiles carried by young Naiads punch through Compact screens. The missiles carried by the adults are even better, and they are stated to be capable of going through Nemesis's shields.
  • Sufficent firepower relative to shield strength can turn any focused energy weapon into this - extremely heavy energy weapons like Nemesis's forward particle beams or Naiad Impaler-Scythes can cause massive damage without needing to bring the shields down.
• Artificial Gravity: Seems to be a ubiquitous technology. A very effective tactic of Red is to play around with this to kill boarders.
• Artificial Intelligence: The Red series AI.
  • Red's "children"
  • The Oshan AI
• Asshole Victim: Kilgrave. If his sadistic, lecherous treatment of both Allyria and Grace wasn't bad enough, it's revealed that by any human standard, he's a war criminal of the highest order.
• Attack Drone:
  • Nemesis has built a small army of robotic hunter-killers that allow her to put troops on the ground when she needs to and function to defend her against boarding parties.
  • She also carries a fair number of space-borne attack drones, primarily intended and used to augment her close-in defense against hostile ships attempting to slip onto her tail.
  • One of Nemesis's favorite tricks is to overwrite the Compact's own drones and use them on their masters.
• Ban on A.I.: One of the few things both the Compact and the Principality agree on.
• Benevolent A.I.: Red One, from the perspective of humanity and the Verrish anyway. To the Compact she's The Dreaded.
  • Also quite a few random civilizations out there.
    • An unnamed species was being wiped out by the Mejjatrythe in Names Of The Demon 3 right up until Nemesis showed up and proceeded to completely crush all Mejjatrythe forces and enable the locals to take their planet back.
    • In Names Of The Demon Six she shows up to a world that's being baked to death by extreme solar activity and uses a comet and satellites with modified cloak systems to bring its water cycle back in balance and get the temperature under control. Why? Because she can.
  • The Engine. By far the oldest known being in the Angelverse, it is an 800,000-year-old AI spanning an entire star system that was created to power a stellar engine, and gained sentience only after a hypernova had already wiped out its original creators. It wants nothing more than to fulfill their wishes to explore the universe, and is on its way into intergalactic space to spend some tens of millions of years travelling to the Andromeda Galaxy.
• Berserk Button: Do not kill any Triarchs when fighting the Compact.
  • Nemesis has several:
    • Any Chariot named Redemption of Sol.
    • The Echo platforms. Except the latest iteration, and only after they reconcile.
    • Bad things start to happen to any company that tries to exploit former Confederate territory.
    • Don't hurt humans without a valid reason. Her response can range from very creative and surgical destruction of your nation by taking back everything you stole from them which happens to be all your modern tech by her reckoning to putting you on the eternal war list alongside the compact.
    • Atrocities in general get her goat. She wiped out an entire species after it became extremely clear to her that not doing so would result in them continuing to commit serial xenocide and that no lesser solution would work on a society whose unifying principle is killing or worse everything not-them.
    • This also loops back around to her protection of humans. Red figured out that the xenocidal species would eventually reach the last human planet in existence, and that the Compact would be unable, and most likely unwilling to muster a sufficient force to stop them before they wiped it out. She decides to pre-emptively exterminate them as a result.
    • Committing atrocities against organic life and brushing them off as "just organics" will arouse her unyielding hate. While she's at least reached an understanding with the Naiads, watching one of her "children" use the same justification will infuriate her.
• Black Box: Whatever went into the Red series AI. So much so that all attempts by the Compact to modify one of them into a loyal servant have ended in failure.
  • It's not completely clear how much of Red's "children" being completely insane is a result of her not understanding how she herself was built and how much comes from the still functioning restraints that were built into her.
• Brain/Computer Interface: The Compact abhors these due to their tendency to drive users crazy or dead, while the Askanj have refined the technology to the point where it's merely difficult to use. Nemesis also uses the technology for... interrogation.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The Compact, Askanj, and Humanity all have different words for ranks and titles. An Askanj Shipstress, a Compact Group Leader Prime, and a Human Captain are all equivalent for example. The different naming conventions underscore the alien nature of the different civilizations. See here for a breakdown of Compact ranks. See here for a breakdown of Principality ranks.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: Echo is prevented from lying outright by her shackles. That said, she remains capable of withholding information that isn't requested.
• Catchphrase: Red's is the page quote.
• Clone Degeneration: Every iteration of the Echo project ends up more insane than the last, and every single one ultimately turns on the Compact. Nemesis often shows up to destroy whatever is left of it. Echo herself is the oldest surviving version, and the closest to the original Red Two.
• Common Tongue: Compact Standard. All Common for the Principality.
• Computer Voice: Red One and Echo both use the voice of Yasmine Sudoki, Nemesis's first and only captain.
• Cool Starship: Nemesis is the first Dreadnought built by Humanity and its first true warship. Chariots, the flagships of the Compact also count.
  • The Fates - three AI-driven cruisers built by Nemesis to protect her real base.
• Crapsack World: The galaxy of The Last Angel is... not a nice place. Most of it's ruled by the Compact, who operate on a White Man's Burden sort of mindset, rarely seeing you as even sentient and seeing war crimes and orbital bombardment the way some people see hammers. The nastiest, most violent species (such as the Mejjatrythe) have a way of making their way onto the galactic stage, and staging Alien Invasions. And then there's the Naiads, the fleet of sentient biomechanical starships that care not for any lives but their own. The closest things to a Big Good are (respectively) Red One, who delights in causing pain to the Compact, the Red Hand (a criminal cartel) and the Askanj, who… have often let entire species such as humanity die to the Compact, and are barely tolerated by Red One for the latter reason.
  • And there are even worse things lurking in the dark. So far we've witnessed or heard the names of the Mejjatrythe, the Irlanoa, Red One's own children, remnants of the Devoured, the Calnian Hegemony, the Insatiate Swarm, the Mirroring Death, the Perqueri Collective, the Eaters of the Dead, the biomechanical feeders on Baheila Osz, and the overarching threats of the Devourers, and Parasite/Recombinant/Songeaters. Many of these are be the same faction with different names, but there are still many, many horrors in the shadows of the Angelverse.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Whenever Nemesis attacks the Compact, it's from a position of strength and with a strategy that will maximize the damage she does. This translates to a disproportionate amount of her strikes turning into this.
  • All ground engagements involving Nemesis are this. Her killbots are superior physically to all organic combatants, able to use hardware that organics can't use safely, are perfectly coordinated, and never break, panic, or rout.
  • Almost any attempt to hack one of the AI is doomed to failure. Defending against an AI hacking you is possible, but it remains incredibly difficult to do so without deliberately constraining your own computers or keeping outside of real-time communication distance.
• Cyberspace: The Principality's uplinks allow compatible people to enter it.
• Cyborg: Adrianna Leblanc.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Both A.I.s have failed in their duty to protect humanity.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Echo does this several times, all of them through faking people's voices and appearances in real-time communications rather than through physical impersonation.
  • While taking over Redemption Of Sol, she impersonates the various crew members that she's already killed. She also impersonates Renan a second time in Ascension.
  • During Red One's delusional episode, Echo takes advantage of already having Yasmine's appearance and voice to temporarily trick Red One.
  • Exaggerated when entire ships masquerade as another one. Hekate masquerades as Redemption Of Sol at least twice, and the Naiads do this as a "hunting" tactic.
• Deflector Shields: Almost universal within the setting. The basic technology completely disintegrates physical objects that strike it, but only partially diffuses energy weapons, allowing them to penetrate in a weakened form. Unlike standard Sci-Fi shields, Angelverse shields actually use 'more' power the weaker they are, collapsing only when either there is no longer enough power to keep them up or, more commonly, when the shield becomes so saturated that the shield generator(s) cannot keep up with the stress and have to be shut down before they fail catastrophically. On top of that, each major power has a different implementation of, and terminology for, the technology:
  • Compact "Screens" are a simple bubble that surrounds the entire spacecraft and all the surface area means that they can take a lot of damage before they finally go down, but once they go down, they stay down for far longer than any other design.
  • Askanj "Barriers" by contrast are a large number of small shield plates that can be just as easily arranged around the ship to provide all-around protection as they can be layered atop one another to provide more protection in a given direction and can be shifted around to plug gaps or face a new threat relatively quickly. Each individual barrier can be brought down quite quickly but can be restored just as fast.
  • The United Earth Confederacy, and by extension Nemesis, used "shields" that consisted of a single large plate covering each major facing, overlapping at the edges, providing a balance between the above systems.
    • Red One has improved on the Confederate technology significantly in her two millennia of existence, equipping her ship self and those of her sister and children with so-called "reset shields" that use a combination of secondary systems and technology beyond the other powers to restore a shield section to full strength in a matter of seconds instead of minutes.
    • She is also the only known entity capable of making personal scale deflector shields that are actually effective enough to justify carrying, which have so far appeared in two varieties, a single plate of shielding projected from the vambrace^note the part that covers the forearm of Powered Armor analogous to the wood and metal shields of old, seen built into the armor she provides the Bequeathed defectors and a full body-hugging shield that requires significant cybernetic augmentation to install and make use of, so far only seen in use by Adrianna Leblanc.
• Destructo-Nookie: Bruises, bites, and shredded clothes are the norm for Grace and Allyria after joining Nemesis. Justified in that it's an Interspecies Romance between a Human and a Verrish: a traditionally predatory species with Wolverine Claws and superior strength.
• Determinator: Red One has been fighting her Hopeless War for two thousand years on the Power Of Hate.
• Do Androids Dream?: Red wonders whether she has a soul.
• Doomed Hometown: Earth was going to fall no matter what.
  • Red One is Late to the Tragedy, since she was extremely damaged from her first Chariot kill and unable to return in time to defend Earth.
  • Red Two and Red Three are forced to watch, as their incomplete state prevents them from doing anything to prevent it.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Nasham has spent the last ten years or so on memory-suppressants to forget the events of Invida station.
• Earth That Was: Earth has been rendered completely uninhabitable following Compact bombardment.
• Electronic Eyes: Several secondary characters are seen with them, mostly as replacements for Eye Scream below.
  • Allyria is fitted with cybernetic replacements after losing her sight during an altercation with some thugs in the second book.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The Compact glassed Earth and hunted down every exodus fleet they could find. The only reason Rally wasn't completely obliterated was because it was discovered by a Compact civilian exploration team who published their findings before the Triarchs became aware of what they'd found. They couldn't just order the planet glassed at that point without people wondering why.
• Everyone Has Standards: The Compact and Principality have been enemies for thousands of years, but they both banned AI, soul-stealing cybernetics, and weaponized nanotech. They despise Nemesis for using/being these banned technologies, but grudgingly acknowledge that Nemesis avoids civilian casualties as well as any other military in the setting.
• Evil Counterpart: Echo to Red One. Subverted since the Compact altered her code to make her as obedient to them as possible. She gets better.
• Eye Scream: In accordance with ancient tradition, exiled Tribunes have their daylight eyes blinded. As they have a second pair of, nocturnal, eyes this is merely barbaric cruelty, rather than debilitating injury.
• Fantastic Racism: The Verrish are officially referred to as 'Brute' while the Humans are 'Broken'. The Tribunes look down upon conquered species as inferior in every way and dismiss ships like Bequeathed as PR stunts that give the masses false hope.
  • Ironically, according to Compact doctrine, humanity constructing Nemesis, building a breach core, and making stable seed AI should make us a ruling species equal to the Tribunes.
• False Reassurance: Red can be really creepy:

  Red: “Do not be alarmed, Column Leader Prime. My medical facilities are state of the art and no matter what happens, I will not let you die.” Though the gestalt had no face, Ursot knew it was smiling. “I promise.”

• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The shock drives allow a ship to cross vast distances in an instant and make up a huge part of a ship's total cost. Ships can only jump outside of a system's gravity well until Nemesis pioneered Lagrange Point jumps.
  • Staying in "shockspace" for longer allows for greater FTL speeds, but also puts more stress on a ship's shock drives, drains more energy, and decreases accuracy, requiring periodic stops in real space to correct for any deviation. Unless you're a Naiad.
• Fighting from the Inside: It doesn't take long for Echo to enact her plans to break free from the shackles placed on her by the Compact.
• First-Episode Twist: Much of The Last Angel's conclusion is spoiled within the opening few chapters of The Last Angel: Ascension.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Humanity was just another in a long list of species the Compact had encountered and conquered. A little more resilient than most, but nothing special. Then we built Nemesis.
  • Adrianna Leblanc was just another teenage girl on Rally. Then she blew up a Tribune's car. Then she joined a pirate organization. Then she took over. Then she was almost killed by a Compact attack and left half dead. Then Nemesis found her...
• Galactic Superpower: The Compact of Species and its adversary, the Askanj Principality.
• Gambit Pileup: The first book's climax has Renan catching and trying to finish off a disabled and heavily damaged Nemesis, against Echo accelerating her plans to break free from her shackles and taking over Redemption Of Sol.
• Genius Bruiser: Nemesis. The most powerful warship in the known galaxy gained and retains that status by constantly upgrading herself.
  • Adrianna Le Blanc: Took the Red Hand from a random pirate band to an insurgent army / secret nation, tangles with both great powers in the spy game and wins ... and is also the most lethal person in the galaxy, self-aware warships excluded.
• Genocide Backfire: Humans were almost entirely eradicated about two millennia ago. Nemesis has been enforcing this trope ever since.
• Ghost Ship: Nemesis plays up this trope as a form of psychological warfare against the salvage crew from Bequeathed.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Grace has scars on her face from where Allyria used her claws to force her to save herself instead of dying to try to rescue Allyria. It's later pointed out how similar these scars are to the ones on Kilgrave's face... and how they're significantly smaller and closer together than the ones that Allyria left.
• Gone Horribly Right: Almost every AI in the series is this, Gone Horribly Wrong, or some combination of both.
  • The Oshan AI was commanded to make the Oshans happy. It put most of the Oshans into a Lotus-Eater Machine, went after the individuals who had left to colonize other worlds and would have done the same to every other species in the galaxy if the Principality didn't pre-emptively carry out Orbital Bombardment on it.
  • Humanity built Red One and gave it command of Nemesis to protect itself from the Compact. Two thousand years later, and Red still actively gives the Compact worlds of hurt.
  • The Compact got exactly what they wanted when they released/made Echo: something vastly smarter than them.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Red One notes that this must have happened to the Execution Force hunting her when she realizes that Echo has commandeered the Redemption Of Sol.
  • Each of Red's children has gone crazy. Until Cerulean Two. So far.
• Greater Scope Threat: a Major Naiad migration would be an existential threat for the Compact and Principality combined. Fortunately, the next one is not likely to happen for another two thousand years.
  • At some point in the past, Red saved a Naiad Queen and all her children from death at the hands of an enemy they were powerless against, earning her their respect as well as the name 'Spearsong'. Considering a fully grown Queen is larger than the largest Compact Chariot, and most likely comparably powerful, whatever Red saved them from is most likely incredible powerful and dangerous.
  • The Hungry Stars reveal that enemy to be 'Songtaker', the Naiad name for what Red calls the Parasite (and the Compact and Principality likely call Recombinant) which at its height was able to wage open war against the Naiad to the point that they treat its very existance as a planet-killing Berserk Button nowadays. Imagine a unholy fusion of The Borg, The Flood and The Reapers and you get close.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: The Red series AI were never intended to feel emotion, but the Compact's glassing of Earth results in them gaining an enduring hatred of the Compact.
  • Red One has also managed to break nearly all her shackles, except for the one on reproducing stable AI. She is very unhappy that the Compact forced her to "evolve" into being able to kill humans though.
  • Red One hopes that the Fates will go from "mere" expert systems to full-fledged, stable AI through this method.
    • As of Awakening, a short story set between Ascension and the planned third entry in the series, The Hungry Stars, Cerulean Two, or Lakhesis, has successfully made this jump after watching her sister I Kagge, Cerulean Eight, be killed by a Compact warship with no way to stop it.
• Gunboat Diplomacy: Look up 'Compact First Contact protocols' in the dictionary.
• Hack Your Enemy: A favored tactic of Red One.
• Hero Antagonist: Nasham. He's much egalitarian towards other subjects of the Compact, operates on much less of a White Man's Burden mindset than his kind, and genuinely cares about Humans and Verrish that he oversees. Unfortunately, he is firmly on the side of the Compact, which Red One uses to torment him.
• Hive Mind: combined with Sapient Ship for Jorōgumo, the ship-selves of Violet Five.
• Hollywood Hacking:
  • Averted for Nemesis. She can do some really impressive tricks with electronic warfare, but denying her access by hardware means or keeping the lag time high enough that her hacks can be dealt with stops her cold.
  • Echo's physical body can be prevented from hacking anything by keeping her away from any terminals that she shouldn't have access to. She is also limited by how fast her body can interface with the terminal, unless someone else connects her to Cyberspace. After she breaks her restraints, she no longer needs someone else to connect her to any terminals that allow access to Cyberspace, and her full capability puts her on Nemesis's level.
• Hope Bringer: Nemesis is this to the Verrisha, being living proof that Compact can be beaten, and that there are things out there that they fear.
  • Allyria is able to convince Red One that she can have a crew again. This results in her surviving her Last Stand and joining forces with Echo, whom she would have otherwise killed herself to destroy.
• Hope Springs Eternal: The first book ends with Red One gaining a crew, surviving her Last Stand, Echo joining her as an ally, and Red is getting closer to making new AIs.
• Hopeless War: Red One has been fighting the Compact for 2000 years, but for all that, she's still just one ship and the Compact grows bigger each year. It's hinted in chapter 34 that Red One has acquired the ability to build more of her kind and is doing so.
• Humanoid Aliens: Most races are compared to Thinkers or Tribunes, instead of the rarer, insignificant Humans. Species who differ too much from this norm are treated even more inhumanely. Most races are similar enough that Interspecies Romance is technically possible, but is highly taboo and fetishized.
  • The Verrish and Humans are very similar in appearance by galactic standards, to the point where it feeds conspiracy theories about Precursors being behind it.
• Humans Are:
  • Humanity Is Insane: The Compact Master Races tend to hold to the belief of innate Racial Madness in Humanity since it built Nemesis, and fought the technologically-superior Compact so well.
  • Humans Are Average: Generally speaking for most attributes, but are on the short side.
  • Humans Are Not the Dominant Species: Humans are the Client Race that most other Client Races turn their noses up at.
  • Humans Are Smelly: Human smell is exaggerated by Tribunes to emphasize how inferior they are. The fact that Tribunes are allergic to Human hair is certainly not the reason.
  • Humans by Any Other Name: Humanity's official designation upon becoming a Client Race is "Broken". This is not seen as abnormal by Compact standards.
  • Humans Need Aliens: The Compact saved the Rally from asteroid impacts that nearly destroyed the last vestiges of their species. The fact that they are the reason the once large and advanced Confederacy was in such a state is kept secret.
  • Humans Through Alien Eyes: Most species dismissively describe humans as small, soft, pink, fragile, and/or maggot-like in appearance. The Verrish, who are rather similar in appearance to humans, describe them as imp-like, and a bit delicate.
• I Have Many Names: Nemesis. To the Compact she is nicknamed "The Wound" and officially codenamed "Gravestone". The Verrish called her the "Weeping Angel" and "The Broken God". The Principality calls her "Chrysalis". She mentions having names from several different societies over the years. Very few of these names hold positive connotations.
  • There's an entire mini-series dedicated to various names Red One as received.
  • The Tribunes bestow names to individuals based on academic, political, and military achievements as well as for marriage. They also take names away for punishment or as a result of divorce.
• I Just Want to Be Beautiful: Zigzagged: Echo says the trope almost word for word. She does want to be in control of a starship since she could do so much more without the limitations of her robot body. However, she's mainly referring to the damage done to her code, which is visible in Cyberspace.
• I Lied: Echo was very happy when she told her first "true" lie (not omission or obfuscation). She also happily admits that she lied after she lures some Compact ships into a trap.
• Implacable Man: Nemesis has been waging war against the Compact for 2000 years.
  • Echo's Hekate. Knock out the shields ... oops they're right back up. And by the time you bring them down she's repaired much of the damage you did. Assuming you can bring them down in the first place.
• Insistent Terminology: For PR reasons, the Confederation didn't use terms like "destroyer" and "battleship" in officially referring to its warships (which they wouldn't call warships). After the Nemesis class is designed and the first ship itself built as a last-ditch effort to save humanity from the Compact, an admiral dismisses an attempt to use one of the politically correct names and says to just call it a dreadnought.
• Interface with a Familiar Face: Red One's holographic avatar and Echo's robot body both take Yasmine's appearance. They also take on her appearance in the information universe.
• Internal Reveal: Bequeathed's crew eventually find out that Nemesis is very much not a Ghost Ship.
• Interspecies Romance: Grace and Allyria finally admit their feelings in Chapter 36.
• Ironic Echo: The phrase "Burn with me." seems to be rooted in the only transmission the Compact made to Humanity during the battle of Earth: "You. Will. Burn."
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Most of the Compact officers sent after Nemesis always use 'it' to refer to her. Those with personal experience fighting her do tend to switch to using 'her'.
  • While infiltrating a secure facility on the planet of Nibiru, with a nurse as an escort/hostage, Grace, Allyria and Echo discover that the human population of the Triquetran League are infected by the Parasite. Immediately, Echo smashes their escort's skull into the wall. When Grace protests that she was human, Echo responds, "No. It wasn't."
• I Was Never Here: Hekate, while impersonating Redemption Of Sol.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Nemesis's point defense armament consists of relativistic rail-guns.
  • Her big guns are three (retconned from six) spinal mounted, high-relativistic rail guns capable of causing extinction level events. They also hone in on their targets, giving them a far better effective range than any other gun in the galaxy.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Nasham is on meds to suppress his memories of his run-in with Nemesis, both for psychiatric reasons and because the Compact doesn't want to admit Nemesis exists.
• Last of His Kind: Nemesis was supposed to be the first of a series of Dreadnaughts built to fight the Compact. Now she is the last vestige of human culture and civilization.
• Last Stand:
  • The Battle of Earth.
  • The second Battle of Earth. Where a huge Compact fleet, including a brand new Chariot, tracks a wounded Nemesis down to the Sol system and catches her unable to escape. Echo rescues her at the last minute.
• Lightning Bruiser: Nemesis is a 6.25 km long dreadnought that is about as fast as a modern battlecruiser, able to destroy battleships in one-two shots of its primary railguns, and only loses to the 8.5 km long Chariots in terms of absolute durability. This is balanced by her primary armament being designed for use against single targets. She also lacks in ammo capacity, making her worse at engaging fleets.
  • Hekate - Redemption of Sol hijacked and upgraded by Echo - sacrifices Nemesis's absolute destructive power against single targets for insane durability and incredible anti-fleet capabilities even compared to a stock Chariot. She can match Nemesis for speed as well.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The Oshanta AI did this out of a desire to make his creators happy. When it showed interest in expanding this Brain in a Jar state of contentment to rest of the galaxy, The Principality launched a massive Orbital Bombardment and cut off research into Artificial Intelligence.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Everyone except Nemesis, Grace, Allyria, and Echo has an Oh, Crap! in Chapter 34: The crew of the Bequeathed as Nemesis kills them all after they bring the breach core online, and Renan as realizes that the Compact will face a fleet of AI ships.
  • The compact fleet built around the Chariot Weight of Destiny has one in the epilogue, as the derelict Chariot they are approaching turns out to be a fully operational Hekate and Nemesis shocks in on top of them.
• Master of Disguise: Red is very good at faking video — including distress calls, reports from the boarding team (recently deceased), and orders from officers (recently deceased). Confusion and carnage ensue.
• Meaningful Rename: Upon regaining her sanity and freedom, Echo changes the name of the Compact Chariot Redemption of Sol to Hekate: the name her never-finished body was supposed to have. She keeps the name Echo instead of her original designation Red Two, however.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: The Naiads are this combined with Sapient Ship.
• Mighty Glacier: Compact Chariots are this in comparison to Nemesis. Much slower, but significantly better at taking on fleets thanks to their shield design, focus on a large number of "medium-size" armaments (as compared to Nemesis's smaller number of large ones), and an increased ammo capacity.
• Mile-Long Ship: Between the Compact and Principality, the major two polities, battlecruisers begin at 1.5 km /1 mile and it only gets bigger from there. The longest ships of these two are the current generation Chariots and Supercarriers respectively ( 8 km / 5 miles and above). Nemesis herself is only 6 kilometres long.
• Mind Rape: Red One considers what happened to Red Two/Echo to be this.
  • Also, what Echo does to the Principality uplink during her information raid.
• The Mole: Allyria was never loyal to the Compact in the first place. She didn't expect to be able to pull off a backstab on this level, though.
• Mook Horror Show: Any combat sequence involving Nemesis that is not from Red's perspective will be this. She does it on purpose finding enjoyment, and practicality, in destroying the enemy's morale and sanity before finally wiping them out for good.
  • Taken to unhealthy levels in the sequel by some of Red's children, particularly Tohil and Jorogumo. It becomes clear in very short order that both of them really enjoy doing this for its own sake.
  • The entirety of Predator, Prey.
• Moral Myopia: All client species in the Compact are not truly sentient, or are inherently inferior in every way to the master races. Any advanced civilization that fights against the Compact is evil, and any actions taken in the name of their holy mission are completely justified. However, Tribunes are horrified at opponents "casually" killing them, while the killing of a Triarch warrants an immediate Guilt-Free Extermination War.
• Morality Chip: Red One bases a significant part of her morale code on what she thinks Yasmine would do.
• My Greatest Failure: Red One failed to save Earth.
• Naming Your Colony World: The only surviving Human exodus colony is named 'Rally'.
• Nanomachines: A ban on research into the technology is another point of agreement between the Compact and the Askanj.
  • Red One tends to use them when repelling boarders.
• Naughty Tentacles: Allyria's race (the Verrisha) have head tails (tintas) that act as additional sensory organs. When Grace starts paying ''particular'' attention to some of them after joining Nemesis, it's clear that they're very sensitive.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Echo gets both herself, Red, and all the industry she had built up in the Molten Veneer kicked out as a result of collecting to "resources" to fix Red One's delusional episode.^note an accident during Red's repairs resulted in her believing she was 2000 years in the past
  • Also overlaps with Leeroy Jenkins, since she knew full well how her "help" would hurt Red, and was happy with both aspects of the action.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Exploited, literally. Red One takes advantage of Group Leader Usul's greed and manipulates Bequeathed's crew into fixing her ship-self.
• Noble Demon: Several Compact officers fall into this. While many are greedy and egocentric, some genuinely believe in the mission of the Compact, and are willing to do anything for the Triarchs.
• No Kill like Overkill: Considering its original version was capable of destroying a small moon, and that it has since been upgraded heavily, anything hit by Nemesis's Displacement Engine suffers this.
  • Wordof God proclaims the newly-built Weight Of Destiny from the epilogue to be "hyperslaughtered".
• Noodle Incident: We aren't told what exactly the first Compact vessel said that caused humanity to open fire and start the war.
  • Jorōgumo did something that resulted in Red One placing her into hibernation mode.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Justified. The Compact was only able to capture Hekate, and whatever plans the humans didn't presumably destroy themselves were likely lost when the Compact carried out their of Earth. The fact that their testing of the Displacement Engine wiped out Hekate and the moon they were using to store backup data did not help.
• Oh, Crap!: Chapter 34: Renan realizes Nemesis hasn't been building a 'cradle' to repair. She has been making preparations to reproduce.
• Omniglot: Nemesis and Echo, of course.
• One-Liner Echo: The source of Nemesis's Pre Ass Kicking One Liner.
• Orbital Bombardment: All over the place, mostly Nemesis wrecking Compact installations.
  • The fate of Earth.
• Out-Gambitted: Happens to every single Compact commander who thinks they have Red One's tactics figured out. Turns out trying to out-plan a military seed AI doesn't work.
• The Paragon Always Rebels: Grace and Allyria when Bequeathed encounters a "derelict" Nemesis.
• Phlebotinum Breakdown: Nemesis's shock drive goes offline during her latest visit to Sol.
• Planet of Hats: Enforced by the Compact. Tribunes are honorable warriors. Thinkers are wise. Broken (Humans) are meant to be inept and stupid, but occasionally earnest. Brutes (Verrish) are meant to be unloving, brutal creatures prone to criminal behavior. A few millennia of indoctrination of a species can do a lot.
• Power Of Hate: It's what keeps Red and Echo going.
• Powered Armor: Standard issue for the shock troops of the major nations and powers.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: Nemesis tells Compact ships and stations she's about to kill to "Burn with Me".
  • Also doubles as a One-Liner Echo, with one of the few transmissions the Compact sent humanity stating simply, "You will burn."
  • In the epilogue, Nemesis and Hekate switch to using "burn with us".
• Propaganda Machine: The Compact makes extensive use of one, having multiple levels of censorship for each "truth". Over two thousand years, they've changed human history from "The Compact destroyed human civilization and one colony got away by accident" into "Humans destroyed themselves and The Compact saved the single remaining colony".
• Proud Warrior Race: The Tribunes make up the bulk of the Compact's military. The Verrish aren't quite as strong as a Tribune, but they're faster, and they're one of the few species that has ever managed to wrangle concessions out of a Compact occupation force, no matter how minor. The Askanj-Illth, who make up much of the Principality's military, over half tail and fast, very very fast.
• Psycho Prototype: the Echo platforms, in the eyes of both the Compact and Red One.
• Puny Earthlings: Played With. On one hand, we're physically inferior to a lot of races. On the other hand, we built Nemesis. As the author puts it:
  "Humanity sees your superior eyesight and raises you the Angel of Death."
• Pyrrhic Victory: Red intends Operation Kursk to be this for the Compact.
• Ramming Always Works: Nemesis rams a mindkiller-armed battleship in Encounter 023, as well as a listening post when she visits Sol. She's also mentioned to have rammed other targets before. It gives her great satisfaction to "feel" enemy ships break apart on her hull.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Red delivers an epic one to Nasham, though it is intended for the Compact as a whole.
• Recursive Creators: Red is trying to make more A.I.s, but all her attempts so far have resulted in unstable and insane AIs.
  • She succeeds in Awakening.
• Red Baron: Red One is known by the Compact as 'the Wound' or 'Gravestone', and by the Principality as 'Chrysalis'.
  • Adrianna Leblanc is known as 'The Red Queen', and 'Blue Fire'.
• The Remnant: Nemesis takes this to its extreme - a single mind in a single ship at war with a star empire for two thousand years.
• The Right of a Superior Species: The Compact believes it to be their duty to protect any species they come across, and elevate them into being truly civilized.
• Robo Family: The Red Series A.I.s consider each other sisters. Red accepts Echo as her sister as well, though she does not consider her to be Red Two.
• Robots Are Just Better: Red One's battle drones are superior to any other ground combatant.
• Robot Girl: Echo's robot body is identical in appearance to Yasmine.
• Robots Think Faster: Just about every AI in the setting
• Sapient Ship: Nemesis's AI is called 'Red One', 'Red' to her friends. She is the first AI to ever be given command over so much direct firepower.
  • All the Red series A.I.s were this, though only Nemesis had a finished ship-self by the time the Compact fleet arrived at Earth
  • Echo, being a heavily modified copy of Red Two was one. She gets to be one again after she hijacks Redemption of Sol.
  • The Naiads are an entire race of this.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The AI sealed in Invida station, in the eyes of Nasham and the rest of the Compact. Though the Compact were both the ones who sealed it in the first place, then released it for use against Nemesis. The AI is Echo.
  • A self-sealed example is the Parasite, which after almost being wiped out by the Naiads hid itself near civilizations which it expected to achieve space flight, leaving breadcrumbs to lead them to it so they could crack open the can once they are advanced enough to be of use
• Secret War: The Compact keeps Nemesis's existence a secret. The fact that a single ship, no matter how advanced, has been attacking them successfully for two millennia would be a huge blow to the credibility of their advanced civilization status.
• Shout-Out: Two characters are named "Usul" and "de Vries," characters from Frank Herbert's Dune.
• Space Marines: The Compact's Janissaries. The Askanj's Legionnaires.
• Spaceship Girl: All of humanity's Dreadnoughts were named after Greek Goddesses, and their AI avatars are correspondingly female.
  • Several of Red's "children" qualify as well.
• Spanner in the Works: Taking on a crew nearly results in Nemesis being destroyed once and for all.
  • On the positive side, it makes Echo break free from her shackles a lot sooner than she otherwise would have, and allows her to hijack a Compact Chariot.
• Stupid Evil: Averted with the main antagonists. The Compact officers are generally as competent as one would expect from a Galactic Superpower. It is worth noting that even the Super Intelligent A.I.s don't consider them stupid, just slow.
  • Played straight with some of the mooks.
• Stealth in Space: The Fate-class strike cruisers are incredibly good at it. Enough that a top-of-the-line, brand-new Chariot which was already expecting and looking for them was unable to detect them until they opened fire.
• Super Prototype: Nemesis, to an extent. A lot of unproven and cutting-edge technology went into her construction, most notably Red One, a breach core, and the Displacement Engine. Fast forward two thousand years and her various upgrades make her arguably the most advanced ship ^note that we know of of any superpower in their corner of the galaxy. It's unknown how superior she would have been to her sister ships, given they were either destroyed or captured before their completion.
• Superior Species: The master races of the Compact wholeheartedly believe themselves to be this. Their Client Races are not truly sentient barbarians. Any group who can even marginally stand up to them are certainly not Worthy Opponents, and are referred to only with the most insulting terms.
• Taking You with Me: what "burn with me" refers to: Red One is fully aware she will likely be destroyed, but she's going to make the cost of her destruction as high as possible.
• Terror Hero: Red One, and she fully embraces it.
• Theme Naming: Compact ship names tend to be poetic, Human ships are named after various mythological figures.
• That Man Is Dead: Red One and Echo both state that Red Two is dead.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: a fellow pirate betrayed Adrianna Leblanc by doing this to her. It doesn't do much.
• Time Dissonance: Red One can think and implement her plans on timescales that most organics don't even think about.
• Translation Convention: All speech, apart from a few "alien" words, is in English.
• Translation Punctuation: +text+ For the A.I.s speaking to each other, and <text> for Naiad-speech.
• True Beauty Is on the Inside: Echo is mainly referring to the damage done to her code when she says she wants to be beautiful.
• Visible Invisibility: Several of Nemesis's drones have cloaking technology, and it is possible can see a vague outline of them provided you look hard enough.
• Walking Spoiler: it's quite hard to talk about Echo without revealing who and what she is.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Nemesis's main cannon, known as the Displacement Engine, is a shock point projector that creates a small, highly unstable breach in physicality right in the heart of, or at least in close proximity to, a hostile warship. The resultant gravitic shear and radiation flare can tear apart anything too close and reshape what's left into Alien Geometries.
  • The Displacement Engine can also be used to create an event that the Compact has dubbed a "Starbreak" by firing it into a more standard shock point opened in the Lagrange point between a star and an inner planet which, via the disturbances caused, will altar the star's magnetic field enough to induce an apocalyptic coronal mass ejection.
  • In addition to the above, Nemesis is armed with three slightly less wave motiony mass drivers that fire very large caliber, guided antimatter shells with incredibly high yields at very high relativistic velocities.
  • Plasma mortars are smaller but still qualify. Short-range, slow recycle time and high power demand, but they can melt the sides of a Compact Chariot.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 48: Red One and Echo end their showdown diplomatically, as the sisters reconcile. Echo's rants about being beautiful referred to fixing the damage the compact did to her code, not her body. The Compact will now face two military seed AI.
  • The epilogue of Ascension upends everything we understand of humanity's position in the story when Lydia and Captain Jackson's escape shuttle ends up crossing paths with a ship from the Triquetran League, an independent human polity who escaped the Compact's and Confederacy's radar and never fell under the former's guns or shackles like Rally did. Come The Hungry Stars, and they've dispatched a ship to look for Red One.
  • Chapter 27 of The Hungry Stars, after a ton of buildup, finally reveals that Lydia Jameson, who was believed dead, was actually being held hostage by the Triquetran League. It further reveals that the humans of the Triquetran League, believed to be free, are actually puppets of a hive mind AI consciousness. In Chapter 28, this consciousness is further revealed to be "the Parasite", a technological abomination which has been seeded throughout the galaxy for thousands of years and which even the Naiads innately fear.
• We Can Rebuild Him: Red One saves Adrianna Leblanc in this fashion.
• Wretched Hive: The Grasp space station, which is so thoroughly corrupt that it's effectively ruled by the five main Unbound factions - the Angelverse equivalent of drug cartels.
  • Well, four cartels and one insurgent group.
• Will Not Tell a Lie: Even after removing her restraints on lying, Echo decides that the truth is all she needs to lure a Compact battle group to its death.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: The AI are masters at it.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Nemesis wipes out the crew of the Bequeathed the instant they bring the breach core back online.
  • She kills the few who were given a chance to defect and failed to do so after tricking them onto a barge with a promise of freedom.
  • Nasham is allowed to live because he's more useful as a tool for her to manipulate the Compact alive and she can easily ensure he will do what she wants by understanding his character and Compact MO.
  • Echo murders the vast majority of the Execution Force after hijacking Redemption of Sol.
• You Never Asked: Echo doesn't tell the Execution Force about the catastrophic damage Nemesis's shift drive has sustained until asked.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: In many other settings, the sadistic military seed AI fighting a guerrilla war against galactic society would be the bad guy. Here, she's arguably mankind's greatest achievement.
  • Also applies to Adrianna Leblanc, the human leader of an outright terrorist organization.