The air cleared up a bit; Sondra’s eyes no longer stung, and her breathing came a little easier. On the holotank display, the icons for two enemy planetary defense bases had gone black. That left three PDBs still in the game, not to mention seventy-eight lesser facilities, each packing the firepower of a battleship. The Marine forces on the ground had performed admirably, but were running dangerously low on supplies. The trickle of warp-dropped supplies wasn’t enough to make a difference.
A quick look at the threat assessment display showed her that trying to send shuttles into the area was still unfeasible. The PDBs no longer covered the entire hemisphere, but enough forts remained to slaughter anything smaller than a warship.
It’s taking too long. She was going to lose most of her Marines, unless she brought her ships closer and engage those forts with her light weapons. Which would result in enough damage to render Third Fleet incapable of continuing its mission.
I fucked up. The realization hit her like a punch in the stomach. Outwardly, she retained her calm demeanor as she ordered the Thermopylae to hover on the edge of the atmosphere. A third PDB fell, but the Marine battalions assaulting the fourth one had to fall back, nearly out of ammo and in danger of being overrun by a mass infantry charge. Only the quick vectoring of half her fighters kept the retreat from turning into a rout. The Obans caught in the open were slaughtered, but it didn’t matter. Two PDBs still stood, and she was going to lose too many ships if she didn’t pull out of range.
“Ma’am, we are being hailed by the Ugo’s Provincial Governor.”
“Onscreen.”
The Oban that appeared on the main 2D display was a corpulent specimen, wreathed in silvery garments, one eye noticeably larger than the other. According to Sondra’s imp, the alien’s expression and body language indicated a great deal of stress.
“American Warmaster: I hereby offer the surrender of this system. We will enact a cease-fire as soon as you accept it. My orders are to make no demands of you and surrender unconditionally, but I would beg you to spare my people.”
If this was a trick, Sondra couldn’t see what it could be. Even a brief cease-fire would only benefit her forces, especially the Marines she’d stranded on the planet.
“I will order a temporary cessation of hostilities while we review your offer, Governor.”
“My Warmasters will comply.”
It took several minutes, but fighting eventually ground to a halt. Damage control parties continued their frantic work, just in case the truce proved to be short-lived. The Obans were true to their word; their ground facilities stopped firing on her ships. The Marines assumed defensive positions and began to dig in.
Once the ceasefire was fully in effect, the Governor hailed her again:
“My superiors want to know two things, Admiral. Can you stop the Black Fleet? Will you stop it, as you claimed was your primary purpose?”
The questions took Sondra aback. Despite US protests to the contrary, the Imperium’s official position had been that Kerensky’s renegades were still under American control, and that the mutiny was merely an excuse to perpetrate atrocities while publicly disavowing them.
“My orders are to stop the Black Ships by any means necessary, Governor. We will do so, even if we have to set your Imperium ablaze in the process.”
The Oban slumped in what might be defeat or relief.
“Then do with us as you will, Warmaster. All we ask is that you stop those monsters.”
What has Kerensky done?
Imperial Star Province Vahan, 169 AFC
Emergence.
The Black Fleet emerged on the edge of Vahan System’s gravity well, seven light-hours away from the inhabited planet that was its target. After being forced to flee during their previous incursion, Kerensky wanted to take his time and observe what awaited him there He only had eight warships and a hundred and twenty fighters left, and any losses at this point would be unacceptable.
Sixty-three new contacts appeared on the holotank. It was to be expected, now that the enemy knew the Black Ships had access to the system. The fleet was small in comparison with the teeming hordes the Imperium had deployed before, but the energy signatures of the new ships were nearly off the scale. All those ships were at least dreadnought class; and twenty of them were super-dreads like the ones he’d ambushed at the Battle of Capricorn. The Imperium had sent an all battlewagon fleet to reinforce the system. Kerensky didn’t know whether they were part of some sort of central reserve, or newly-built vessels, not that the answer mattered much at this point.
In any sort of conventional action, his forces would be annihilated in short order. Even ghosting wouldn’t save them. Enough residual energy would get through. And the thousands-strong swarm of STL fighters was somewhere in the area as well, lurking in stealth mode to turn the Black Ships’ warp generators against their owners. If he fled, those ships would likely follow him to Sokolov System and finish him off there. Under any other circumstances, his situation would be hopeless.
“You have nothing to fear,” the Prophet said, or rather, the thing using the Prophet as its meat puppet.
“To put it to the touch, to win or lose it all,” Kerensky heard himself say. The quote was a reflex from what remained of his human mind. Losing or dying didn’t matter all that much anymore.
“We will proceed with our plan,” he sent out. The telepathic orders reached everyone instantly. Moments later, they were underway.
Inside warp space, the Prophet dropped any pretense of humanity. The thing that remained by Kerensky’s side was in constant flux, changing shapes and species from one instant to the next. Humans from the admiral’s past were intermixed with aliens from every Starfarer species he knew of and many others he didn’t recognize. Beneath all the fake forms lurked something far worse, something that would shatter even Kerensky’s hybrid mind if it fully revealed itself. The Warpling inside him was terrified of the one that had devoured the Prophet. And the Prophet was in turn intimidated by the One who had accepted the Black Fleet’s sacrifice at Sokolov System.
“Everything will be well, Nikolai,” the Prophet whispered in his grandmother’s voice.
The Black Ships arrived within half a light-second from the enemy wall of battle, point-blank range for most weapon systems. They remained on the threshold between universes, their warp generators working overtime to keep them there. All eight vessels fired with every weapon system in their arsenal. Their firepower was relatively puny, but they all targeted a single dreadnought and inflicted some damage. Even though Kerensky knew those broadsides were merely a distraction, the professional side of him noted with appreciation that his gunners were doing their job far better than they had when they’d still been merely human.
The Imperium defenders reacted swiftly enough. Warships returned fire within seconds of ghosting ships’ arrival. Over two thousand converted shuttles turned off their stealth fields and targeted the warp apertures with their disruptors, hoping to repeat their previous success. Specially-attuned graviton beams began interacting with the warped spacetime fields around the Black Fleet, altering their energy gradients.
This time, however, the results were not at all what Imperium designers had intended.
The warp apertures grew to impossible sizes, generating tidal waves that filled all graviton-based communication and sensor systems with static and exerted enough force even at tens of thousands of kilometers away to send ships veering off-course or make them vibrate like glasses struck by a high-pitch sound. Hundreds of the enemy shuttles were destroyed outright, either by side effects of their own weapons or spacetime distortions they’d unwittingly helped create. The Black Ships were unaffected and continued to fire on their targets. It was something to do until the real killing work began
A host of Warplings poured out of the enlarged apertures.
Most of them were formless wraiths, beings of pure tachyons who leaped towards the nearest Imperium vessels like a swarm of angry hornets. Chaos erupted
as crewmembers had their minds shredded, becoming mindless beasts bent only on destruction. Thousands of others died screaming as their souls were ripped from their bodies.
Kerensky’s enhanced senses watched the process. He followed one of the bodiless entities as it pounced on the captain of a superdreadnought. He observed as the Psychovore reached for the Denn’s very essence, the poorly-understood intersection of brain activity and something above and beyond it that comprised his identity and personality. The process was beyond an attack; it was a violation in every sense of the word. The Imperial’s body collapsed lifelessly, but Kerensky heard the alien’s mental shrieks of impossible agony long after that.
Seven Warplings manifested themselves physically. The entities’ bodies were composed of dead flesh and twisted metals, fashioned from long-lost ships and spacers. At the core of each of them was a gateway to the realm of their birth: Kerensky saw those gateways pulsing like beating heartbeats as they drew upon the unearthly energies from warp space for sustenance. The physical shapes were shifting but always monstrous, things that any sophont in the universe would immediately recognize as something utterly inimical to all things born in this universe. The massive forms, as large as a starship and moving twice as fast, released pulses of energy at the Imperium vessels, striking them with enough power to rupture shields and armored hulls.
Only eleven enemy ships were destroyed conventionally by the embodied monsters. Another two dreadnoughts simply ceased to exist, each seized by one of the largest Warplings and carried off into their own realm, their crews still alive to be digested at the entities’ leisure. The remaining fifty or so vessels simply stopped fighting or maneuvering after most of their crews died or were possessed. The psychic rampage reached all the way to the orbital facilities around the single inhabited planet, Its four space fortresses fell silent.
Summoning those entities hadn’t come cheap, even with the unwitting help of the enemy. Kerensky had paid them in the only coin they would accept: the innocents on Sokolov-Four. That planet had been stripped of all sapient life to provide the fodder Psychovores needed to cross over into this side of the Divide. The admiral watched what he had brought, marveling at the power displayed by his allies. His human side was numbed by horror and shame, but he ignored it. The new version of him felt nothing but a cold, detached satisfaction.
Retribution was at hand, and that was all that mattered.
The battle – the massacre, to be technical about it – was over in under an hour. The Warplings couldn’t stay for long; one by one, they withdrew, leaving behind only brief-lived shimmering lights at their departure points. To ensure their future cooperation, he would make an additional offering, using the three hundred million denizens of this system as new sacrificial victims.
A hundred fighters materialized along the surface of Vahan-Three and unleashed their Mind-Killers upon its largely warp-blind inhabitants, killing them by the millions. The psychic echoes of the dying no longer stirred much emotion in Kerensky. Not after having witnessed a similar slaughter on a much larger scale on the system he’d named after his grandmother.
“Rejoice, Nikolai,” the Prophet said. “We have given you everything you wished for, and more. You should be happy.”
“I’ll be happy when the job is done,” he lied. He no longer knew what happiness felt like.
They would spend a few weeks looting the system. They were in dire needs of consumables and spare parts. Their constant use of warp engines wore down those systems considerably, and Kerensky wanted to replace them before embarking on the last leg of their journey. Finding spares wouldn’t be a problem: there were dozens of intact warships he could strip for parts. They could afford to spend the time required to make all necessary repairs. The Imperium was more than welcome to send another fleet here.
The Warplings were still hungry.
Primus System, 169 AFC
Warmaster Amun had served the Galactic Imperium for twelve hundred years. He had participated in twenty-three wars and forty-nine lesser conflicts. And in all that time, he never expected he would utter the words he now heard coming from his mouth:
“I cannot guarantee the safety of Primus System.”
There were no courtiers or lesser functionaries to gape in astonished terror at the pronouncement. The only sophonts present where the Three Principes, none of whom were given to displays of emotion. The three most powerful beings in the Imperium and, until recently, of the known galaxy, greeted the bald statement with silence.
“We dispatched one third of the Triumvirate’s Guard to Vahan Province,” Amun elaborated. “Our best ships and crews, the elite of the Unity. The last QE-telegram from Vahan-Two reported that the humans destroyed our forces at no loss to their own. Our new weapon systems were ineffective. No further communication has occurred since. We must assume that the system has fallen.”
“We are expecting reinforcements,” Magnanimous Tertius said. “A hundred ships will arrive within a week. Twice as many a week after.”
Amun dismissed the Kreck Princeps’ statement with a contemptuous tilt of his head.
“The forces in Vahan Province fell in a matter of minutes,” he replied. “The reports indicate the enemy is deploying warp entities that can annihilate starship crews. Neither shields nor armor, nor the valor of our warriors, can withstand them. A hundred ships – with green crews, since the flower of our navy has been consigned to Oblivion – will fare no better.”
“I warned you.”
Everyone turned towards Boma, the Denn Princeps.
How the mighty have fallen, Amun thought. The shame Boma had brought to his entire species would never be erased, even if the Imperium survived the coming disaster. The once proud and powerful Boma looked frail; he had lost a great deal of weight in the past few months, as the news of increasingly devastating defeats became impossible to hide. As the chief instigator of this conflict, the Princeps bore full responsibility for the greatest crisis in the Imperium’s three-thousand-year history. An unprecedented number of ships, systems and Voters had been lost. And for what?
“I warned you all,” Boma repeated, seemingly unaware of the quick glances the other two Principes exchanged. “Humans have shown themselves to be as dangerous as I predicted. If we had acted with the proper resolve, if we hadn’t tarried as long as we did, we could have quenched this fire before it became a conflagration great enough to consume us all.”
“If, if, if,” the Oban Princeps Norok said in a mocking tone. “If we had ignored your bleating, billions would still live. A second human fleet is in orbit around the Oban birth-world as we speak. I have ordered our forces there to surrender. The only way to stop the human renegades is to let other humans handle them.”
Amun already knew of this. He had sent the orders himself before attending this meeting. The Kreck Princeps paused for a second to digest the unexpected news before he made a gesture of agreement. The only dissenting voice was the disgraced Denn’s.
“Are you insane? We cannot treat with those Chaos-tainted creatures!”
“The decision has been made, Princeps,” Norok told him. The Oban had been planning this move for quite some time, with Amun’s complicity. It was too bad it had taken this long to come to fruition, but Boma needed to be thoroughly discredited before the conspiracy could act.
“We are the Three. You do not rule the Imperium by yourself, Norok!”
“Neither do you,” Princeps Tertius said. “And while I do not condone Norok’s actions, it is you, Boma, who unilaterally pushed for this war. You who convinced us to go along with your wishes. For the good of the Imperium. Now I will go along with Norok’s plans. For the good of the Imperium.”
When it was all over, Tertius would be the Senior Princeps, assuming Boma’s mantle. Norok had accurately predicted the Kreck would support what was about to happen. The Oban would let Tertius assume the mantle of leadership while he pulled the strings behind the scenes.
“Warmaster Amun has been selected
by the Denn Mega-Proxies to take your place.”
“What? A failed Warmaster who led us from one defeat to the next?” Boma all but growled. In his anger, he briefly looked like the Princeps of old, and Amun almost felt sorry for his fellow Denn. Almost.
“The Proxies do not have authority to depose me.”
“No, but they can select your successor,” Norok explained. “Following your unfortunate demise.”
Boma understood. He leaped to his feet, personal force fields shimmering around him even as his implants tried to summon his personal guard. The latter effort was futile; Amun had seen to that. The Princeps’ guards had all been quietly disposed of before the meeting began. The Warmaster regretted the necessity, but the hand-picked bodyguards would never have agreed to what was about to happen.
Amun drew his ceremonial dagger and stepped forward. Shields could guard against energy and missile attacks, but not against a determined sophont with a blade in his hand and the skill and determination to wield it. He pounced on the Princeps. Boma was too shocked to do much more than thrash ineffectually as Amun stabbed him over and over. It was a bloody, messy, and undignified end for someone who had once ruled over the largest polity in the known galaxy. It was also less than what he deserved for bringing said polity to the brink.
“It is finished,” he said, rising over the still-twitching corpse.
“Now we save the Imperium.”
New Washington, Sol System, 169 AFC
“In addition to an immediate ceasefire on all fronts, the Imperium’s offer includes the return of all interned humans within its borders – some thirty-five million people – the surrender of Star Provinces Mellak and Kezz, and war reparations to be paid over a five-year period,” Secretary of State Goftalu said.
The actual amounts involved were enough to get Chief of Staff Tyson Keller to raise his eyebrows. The offer was three times what the US had extracted from the Vipers when they surrendered. Even for the wealthiest polity in the known galaxy, writing those checks was going to hurt. The Gimps were already dangerously close to bankruptcy, and this would take them right to the edge.
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