The Last Angel: Ascension

[kalvasflam]

I doubt Jerrico would break.
He is too seasoned a commander and has committed too much to such a high priority target for the opportunity to foil the Compacts plans.
He realizes the stakes, that if Sundial were allowed to proceed, the damage not only to Kebrak Doun but the surrounding systems and other Argosy lynchpin systems would take would ne nothing more than a herald of the first strike of the Compacts winning campaign against his people.
Read differently, he realizes that if Sundial begins, even over the course of the centuries it would take the Conpact to finish the fight, even were they to declare this current Age of Expansion at an and, that there would be no way for the Argosy to recover militarily, financially, or strategically after that assault. There are millennia of infrastructure at stake which would never ne able to be fully recovered, and even with the current situation, the Argosy is barely able to hold back the onslaught of the Compact forces.
The only reason he took the word of the Red Hand and an emissary of Chrysalis herself, and engage in this full on risky assault, was because he confirmed the rumors himself and recognized the gravity of the threat his polity was facing.
No. I don't believe there is any turning back for Noble Fleet Lord Jerrico. His government already took the risk of a coordinated attack with the Red Hand, he is now openly fighting alongside the pirate faction, amd he understands that winning here, preventing Sundial, even if he has to order every ship under his command to Ram Speed straight into the teeth of the maw, he is committed.
There may be recriminations, there may be surprises, blame, finger pointing, and scapegoating, but for him, the situation is dire.
Win here and stop Sundials strike, or lose the war.

Click to shrink...

Jirrico is attacking Galhemna based on certain assumptions and facts:

• Fact: Sundial is coming from Galhemna.
  
• Fact: Sundial will crush the Principality defenses if he does nothing. If he doesn't strangle it in the womb, the Principality will be crippled to say the least. Mainly because even if he just bleeds Sundial, it has the ability to outproduce him.
  
• Fact: Red hand is supporting the attack.
• Fact: To kill Sundial, he needs to get to the inner systems.
  
• Assumption: The AI will help in the assault. (yes, we know this is a fact, but for him, it's an assumption)
• Assumption: With the AI's support, he can blow open Galhemna and kill Sundial (this is in part based on the assumption below, and also because he has recon to show something of what Galhemna holds)
  
• Assumption: Sundial is not yet fully ready, the chariots aren't online. (we know this is false, and he knows it in part because of Weight of Destiny)

So, if the first assumption and the third assumption doesn't hold true, then he has no chance of killing Sundial, he already knows this. So, it comes down to a matter of timing. If the chariots shows up on his scans early. Then there is no AI to show up, and assuming he still has a chance to escape, he might very well do so, otherwise, he is spending his forces on a fool's hope, and he will die for nothing. That's the calculation of this fleet commander. 600 ships is likely to be quite sizeable portion of the Principality's forces. There is something to be said about preserving your forces to fight another day if the odds are hopeless.

For the Compact, the equation is rather simpler, Kemk thinks he sees all of the enemies he has in front of him. He might still be cautious, but in his view, he has two fully functional chariots, with a third on the way, although the timing might be very questionable, no FTL comms means no way to coordinate his forces. But the correlation of forces is in his favor to the extreme. He could just show off those two chariots, and force his enemies to quit the field. But he wants to kill both the Red Queen and Jirrico. So, this might mean he decides to take risks with these chariots, or the other Bastion leader might. But it also could mean that he shocks out a hundred battleships to cut off the line of retreat. Then sandwich his enemies. Either way, he is likely to conduct more intrasystem shocks. My guess is he does so with at least one chariot, or an overwhelming fleet of heavy ships, probably more than Jirrico has.

For the AI, it is only about timing. They are going to hit at the point of maximum vulnerability for the Compact, that is going to be when the Compact has the Red Queen and Jirrico by the balls (sure, why can't LeBlanc have balls) and is ready to squish them into paste. Their backs open, and then the AIs come in, and suddenly, Galhemna's inner system is in flames, but more likely, the two chariots die horrible deaths, and the attendant Compact fleet gets scattered to the winds.

 

[amblingon]

Hey, I was wondering - can anyone here recommend any other sci-fi books or webfiction that remind them of TLA? Specifically, I really enjoy the space battles Prox writes; the universe seems basically grounded (people fight with missiles, railguns and lasers, with a smattering of more exotic tech; wars are decided by industrial capacity, not crazy one-off superweapons), physically plausible (engagements take place across hundreds of thousands of kilometers, not within visual range), and have great characters and interesting strategies.

By contrast, I really haven't enjoyed sci-fi that has all the battles basically be the equivalent of 1940s naval engagements. I also really dislike the trope of vast tech disparities deciding everything, i.e. one battleship with invincible shields destroys entire enemy fleets (this semi-ruined the later

Spoiler

Expanse

books for me).

I'd be incredibly grateful for any recommendations!

 

[Hatsuwr]

Hey, I was wondering - can anyone here recommend any other sci-fi books or webfiction that remind them of TLA? Specifically, I really enjoy the space battles Prox writes; the universe seems basically grounded (people fight with missiles, railguns and lasers, with a smattering of more exotic tech; wars are decided by industrial capacity, not crazy one-off superweapons), physically plausible (engagements take place across hundreds of thousands of kilometers, not within visual range), and have great characters and interesting strategies.

By contrast, I really haven't enjoyed sci-fi that has all the battles basically be the equivalent of 1940s naval engagements. I also really dislike the trope of vast tech disparities deciding everything, i.e. one battleship with invincible shields destroys entire enemy fleets (this semi-ruined the later

Spoiler

Expanse

books for me).

I'd be incredibly grateful for any recommendations!

Click to shrink...

I actually found TLA from a comment in this story posted on Reddit. Much shorter sadly, but it has some similar themes.

 

[theUub]

I actually found TLA from a comment in this story posted on Reddit. Much shorter sadly, but it has some similar themes.

Click to shrink...

I have a couple suggestions.
The first recommendation I have is something I got from a user on this boars while reading Prox work.
Its The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell
The rules, tactics, and weapons are different, but I think what you're likely after is good writing/description, enough detail to describe the action while allowing your imagination to fill in the blanks, along with actual struggle and a fear or sense of impending loss. It has a great contiguous story with relatable characters and development, as well as some surprisingly fun or serious byline stories built in.
My next recommendation is the first ten or twelve books of the Honor Harrington series from David Weber. Its a space opera with an early focus on the politys navy and naval growth in the face of a looming threat. Again the rules of the universe are different, and be prepared for the occasional couple pages of exposition in the early books, but it's hard space battle sci-fi which sticks to a "reality" where while each polity has their strengths and weaknesses, the advamcements of each sides research and weapon deployment, as well as tactics developed and used to counter thise new advances, maintains a sort of parity between those forces. The author gets full of himself and the series focuses less and less on the naval battles and more on the political machinations with some spess war thrown in to keep the readers happy as it progresses. For me, the series ends with book eleven: At All Costs
Although the author does continue to push more books out afterward, they are mostly political exposition, and werent we'll received.
Of you like the early series though, you could try the Horatio Hornblower series its supposed to be an homage to, its not spess battles, it's broadside wet-naval combat with sails. But its good.
Also check out the Aubrey-Maturin series by a guy named Patrick. You may want to watch Master and Commander first, which mashes scenes from three of the books together.

 

[thegreatpl]

I feel I should mention that while Honor Harrington starts off with wooden ship Napoleonic era naval combat in space, the tech begins to head towards more WW2 naval tactics in later books (carriers and off bore shooting). Tech advancements do decide battles in some of the books, however, the other side often advances as well and catches up with the changes soon enough (though, do note I stopped reading the series as well, though slightly after At All Costs). Its more a case of 'here is a new tech which completely changes the course of naval warfare' than 'this one ship is so advanced no one can stratch it' or 'new superweapon!'. Actually, the special weapon of the first book (which is never mentioned again) was basically considered a failure in the book itself. So called 'super weapons' like that either fail, only worked in those conditions, or are moving towards general deployment by the next book or two.

At All Costs was, however, supposed to be the end book in Honor Harrington series in the original plan, before the novels continued with her son. The Eric Flint screwed that up in a short story he wrote. He does also drop exposition a lot, and sometimes in some odd places (multiple pages of exposition about how ftl travel works in the middle of the climatic battle of the first book, for example). On the whole though, I second the recommendation.

 

[Rabiator]

There is also Schlock Mercenary. The Schlock Archives. While Schlock Mercenary does not take itself as seriously as TLA, it has everything that a semi-hard Space Opera needs. Battles, internally consistent tech/science, and lots of Bad Guys.

 

[Landa]

There is also Schlock Mercenary. The Schlock Archives. While Schlock Mercenary does not take itself as seriously as TLA, it has everything that a semi-hard Space Opera needs. Battles, internally consistent tech/science, and lots of Bad Guys.

Click to shrink...

Also, Howard Taylor tends to think through the ramification of high-tech to very horrific ends.

I have been reading Schlock Mercenary for years and wholeheartedly agree with the recommendation (though the very first books are a bit hard to look at admittedly ).

 

[amblingon]

Thanks the recommendations all! Will definitely check out Campbell and Howard Taylor. Incidentally, it probably violates my own point about being 'grounded,' but Ian Banks has some of the best ultra-far-future sci-fi battles I've ever read; there's an amazing, sprawling battle in Excession that you only retroactively realized happened over the span of a few microseconds that particularly stands out for me.

I admit I did read the first few Honor Harrington books and didn't love them - the trope of a small, protagonist polity routinely defeating much larger powers in hugely one-sided routs, due to being vastly smarter and better at developing technology, just never is all that interesting to me. There was one battle in particular where I remember the death ratio being something like 2,000 to 5 million, and a couple small protagonist frigates being destroyed vs. hundreds of antagonist superdreadnoughts, because the bad guys were just so stupid and bad at developing starships... meanwhile those same bad guys had something like 2,000 times the terrority, member worlds, and orbital industry that the protagonists had (but evidently more idiotic researchers and engineers).

I really like that in TLA, there are reasonable and substantial differences in technology between various polities, but nothing feels utterly absurd; a Compact frigate might be pound-for-pound tougher than a Principality frigate, but it's probably not going to single-handedly kill a Principality cruiser. Similarly, everyone is constantly advancing technology, but in ways that feel logical even when they have a big impact; it's a big deal if your next-gen missiles have a 20% longer range than your enemy expects, but in the HH books it's more like "within a span of 2 years, an entirely new technology has been conceived of, tested, implemented, and deployed than makes all previous technologies obsolete." Oh, and it's always the protagonists doing this, even when their enemies are vastly larger, wealthier, and have correspondingly huge advantages in the size of their military-industrial and research complexes.

...not to rant.

 

[GantradiesDracos]

Thanks the recommendations all! Will definitely check out Campbell and Howard Taylor. Incidentally, it probably violates my own point about being 'grounded,' but Ian Banks has some of the best ultra-far-future sci-fi battles I've ever read; there's an amazing, sprawling battle in Excession that you only retroactively realized happened over the span of a few microseconds that particularly stands out for me.

I admit I did read the first few Honor Harrington books and didn't love them - the trope of a small, protagonist polity routinely defeating much larger powers in hugely one-sided routs, due to being vastly smarter and better at developing technology, just never is all that interesting to me. There was one battle in particular where I remember the death ratio being something like 2,000 to 5 million, and a couple small protagonist frigates being destroyed vs. hundreds of antagonist superdreadnoughts, because the bad guys were just so stupid and bad at developing starships... meanwhile those same bad guys had something like 2,000 times the terrority, member worlds, and orbital industry that the protagonists had (but evidently more idiotic researchers and engineers).

I really like that in TLA, there are reasonable and substantial differences in technology between various polities, but nothing feels utterly absurd; a Compact frigate might be pound-for-pound tougher than a Principality frigate, but it's probably not going to single-handedly kill a Principality cruiser. Similarly, everyone is constantly advancing technology, but in ways that feel logical even when they have a big impact; it's a big deal if your next-gen missiles have a 20% longer range than your enemy expects, but in the HH books it's more like "within a span of 2 years, an entirely new technology has been conceived of, tested, implemented, and deployed than makes all previous technologies obsolete." Oh, and it's always the protagonists doing this, even when their enemies are vastly larger, wealthier, and have correspondingly huge advantages in the size of their military-industrial and research complexes.

...not to rant.

Click to shrink...

to be entirely fair (you have a lot of points), a lot of the "balance" issues do actually have a reasonable justification- Harrington's first massive upset was almost literally dumb luck against a massively superior opponent who got unlucky by doing what, on literally any other ship of His targets class, would have just been closing to mop up- her second, the enemy crew were an untrained rabble self-training themselves how to fight a warship on the fly after doing something IMMEASURABLY stupid....

the opposition was a paper tiger, riddled with rot like the Ottoman empire if it'd decayed another hundred years or so before falling-going up against a younger polity flush from running the hyperspace equivalent of the panama canal..

there was a battle with a hilariously lopsided count like you mentioned,two/three, i think,could be wrong, but it was towards the the end-and the inequality of military capabilities was a plot point (and one of the stomp's had mitigating circumstances)- they'd slashed their R&D budget over a century ago, and still had the institutional mindset they had as top-dog in local space-if they'd pulled their thumbs out faster....

there actually is historical precedent for the kind of appalling arrogance the other oppfor exhibited-and for the offender recovering from it- during WW1,for a period after entering the war, the US Army(it may have actually been the pollies) was facepalm-inducingly reluctant to actually ISSUE BAR's due to a bad case of Eagleland syndrome-which was a heavy contributor to their critical shortage of automatic weapons/machineguns-they had them in inventory, just refused to hand them out for a really stupid reason.

im actually serious, i mean, not being mocking or joking around- the staff had convinced themselves it was literally the best, most advanced weapon on the planet (only minor hyperbole in my wording- it was a good, solid gun, but REALLY,they got themselves awfully worked up), and were terrified of Germany/the Central powers copying it....which was one of the contributors to the poorly-converted Chauchat fiasco.

...and then Weber got full of himself and started writing political intrigue instead of combat >.<

agree with the stuff about the disparities being less...ridiculous in TLA- in retrospect the torrent of game changers...was a little ..rapid. i mean, they completely redefined Navel warfare something like 3-5 times in a decade- each of them was essentially a Dreadnought/Carrier aviation level change, strategically and tactically...

 

[amblingon]

agree with the stuff about the disparities being less...ridiculous in TLA- in retrospect the torrent of game changers...was a little ..rapid. i mean, they completely redefined Navel warfare something like 3-5 times in a decade- each of them was essentially a Dreadnought/Carrier aviation level change, strategically and tactically...

Click to shrink...

Yeah, and even worse, they all were made by the protagonists. It's like if Tonga fought a war against NATO in the Pacific, and won every single battle because they revolutionized naval technology on a weekly basis. I don't care how much handwaving you do about the smart competitive industrious Tonganese researchers outperforming the lazy nepotistic inefficient American/German/French researchers, it's just... dumb.

The characterization of the Solarians never made any sense anyway, though. They simultaneously have all the problems of a loose, decentralized weak coalition (i.e. the EU or the Articles of Confederation-era US), and all the problems of a massively bureaucratic, overcentralized, command-economy-style superpower (i.e. the USSR).

Honestly, after the first couple books, the whole series started to feel like a repetition of this scene:

Hundreds of enemy ships warp in. "Honor Harrington, we're here to kill you! But we're all so lazy and stupid from receiving welfare checks and holding elections that we forgot to put guns on our ships!"

Honor: "I'm outnumbered! But fortunately my aristocratic heritage has taught me to be steely and brilliant nevertheless!"

*Pushes button, enemy fleet explodes*

 

[Banedom223]

Phoneposting, so please be paitient with formatting and grammar, it's been a long week.
But i do not believe red and her sister will show up to support Lebanc or the ghost fleet.
They will walt until the invaders appear to be overwhelmed and about to be defeated, with two chariots coming online within hours, neither group of invaders has a hope of winning. We know this for a fact.
Defenses are gathered in the outer system, we know this.
Invaders can't truly hope to kill inner system. Also known.
Invaders assume (1) chariot killer is incoming, not knowing when(hekate isn't known by the principality).
Red and her sister want to maximize damage, we know this(lynchpin).
Red knows what is going on in system per Bathory communication. Known.


So, going off our knowledge, why wouldn't red walt until battle lines are drawn, and either shock deep in system, causing hell and splitting forces( look at the happy accident that is two chariot killers in your living room vs the pirates in your yard).
Or waiting till after the invader vs defender battle is committed. Free reign on the inner system.

Most likely in my mind is red shocking in (pre invader vs defender) deep in system, catching the compact out of position, while letting the warp missiles free. (Welcome to the madness) the invaders "panic" about the unexpected surprise, raiding outer system, enjoying the chaos, but staying far away from red. Maybe a few invaders are killed by red for plausible deniability. But defenders are caught easy on the back foot. Invaders hoped for this and got what they wanted.

Also, i find very few references to echo talking rho the dying watchers.
Sleep now brother.

 

[subsider34]

I know this is a bit late, but rereading chapter 46.2 I found two jarring typos. Based on a quick search they don't appear to have been reported before, so here you go. Conveniently they are in adjoining paragraphs.

The plan, as the Principality had agreed to it, had been for the Red Hand to strike at Natuous, to decapitate the Compact’s leadership and draw away Galhemna’s garrison. Severance, supported by the promised arrival of Chrysalis, would attack Galhemna directly, gutting Sundial before it could be born. Instead, the Red Queen had divided her forces, sending the smaller element to Natuous. Jirrico hadn’t been happy, but Leblanc had made a passionate case for Twenty Pearls, and the plan had already been in motion, so Jirrico found himself fighting alongside the Red Hand. Publicly. Not an idea situation, but it had been too late to back out, and he had to admit… the Broken was capable enough.

Standing on Exsanguinator’s command deck, watching the liquid metal displays form and solidify as the supercarrier’s sensors cleared and it could behold its surroundings, Jirrico allowed himself a wide, toothed grin. In his people, the gesture was a sign of aggression and threat. It matched how he felt. The Argosy was supposed to strike at a much-depleted Galhemna, killing ships still in their docks and obliterating the industry that built them, supported by Chrysalis. Apparently, the Red Queen had had either ideas... and the neverborn was not here.

Click to shrink...

 

[Traitor]

Hey, I was wondering - can anyone here recommend any other sci-fi books or webfiction that remind them of TLA? Specifically, I really enjoy the space battles Prox writes; the universe seems basically grounded (people fight with missiles, railguns and lasers, with a smattering of more exotic tech; wars are decided by industrial capacity, not crazy one-off superweapons), physically plausible (engagements take place across hundreds of thousands of kilometers, not within visual range), and have great characters and interesting strategies.

By contrast, I really haven't enjoyed sci-fi that has all the battles basically be the equivalent of 1940s naval engagements. I also really dislike the trope of vast tech disparities deciding everything, i.e. one battleship with invincible shields destroys entire enemy fleets (this semi-ruined the later

Spoiler

Expanse

books for me).

I'd be incredibly grateful for any recommendations!

Click to shrink...

Try Neal Asher's Polity series, they are similar in some respects (ships, space battles, realistic ranges, realistic consequences of tech) but have their own flavour.
There's a lot more use of AI, and bioengineering/cyborgism, there are fewer aliens, but the ones that do exist are extremely formidable.
(I'd bet on a Prador over any of the Compact or Principality forces we've seen, hell I'd bet on it vs Red's automatons as well).
There is definitely a similarly themed "ancient horrors" subplot going there too, but I will not mention any spoilers.

 

[Rabiator]

Maybe a few invaders are killed by red for plausible deniability. But defenders are caught easy on the back foot. Invaders hoped for this and got what they wanted.

Click to shrink...

The Red Hand has just committed to outright war against the Compact. They do no longer count as a few annoying pirates, the Compact will hunt them in earnest now. Killing allies for plausible deniability makes no more sense for Red at this point.

 

[Proximal Flame]

Fifteen pages...
You know, I did the halving of chapter to avoid having stuff this big all at once.

Anyways, this is the conclusion to Chapter 47. In this chapter, plans go awry. Whose plans? Everyone's.

story of the city / operation: annihilate! / nestburn

Coming up:

wrath of gods / now you can die / vetala

My patreon.

Chapter 49

Something was wrong. Faithful Prime Sevam-Lut-Sorp could feel in it in his guts. The Builder was overseeing the recovery and analysis of the wreckage of Redemption of Sol. This task was a necessary one, but also somber. The vessel had not just been a Chariot; it had been a Triarch’s Chariot. The Triarchs had ruled the Compact for six thousand years, their strength and will seeing them survive the corruption of the Devoured and the treachery of the Betrayers. Their determination, their guidance, their vision had shaped the galaxy more than any other species in existence. To scrummage through the wreckage where one of them had been murdered felt almost profane.

Despite his position as a non-commissioned officer, Sevam-Lut-Sorp was one of the comparative handful of crew aboard the Execution Force who knew the full truth of their mission. For the past forty years, he had specialized in the study of the Wound’s technology, ever since a much younger Epigone Sevam-Lut-Sorp had submitted a report regarding unclassified technology he’d discovered in a derelict freighter. That document had caught the attention of Force Command and the Builder had been transferred to a new – rather, very old – asset tracking group, where he’d been given further chances to study recovered pieces of Gravestone’s technology. From there, ‘Gravestone’ had become ‘the Wound’ and Sevam had learned the true nature of the Compact’s enemy.

Of late, stranger and more esoteric artefacts had found their way into his lab. Force Command had remained mum on the origins, but they wanted to know if they had come from the Wound, or had any relation to it. The prime and his team had carefully studied the technology; while there were similarities between those and that of the Wound, it seemed more a matter of analogous evolution rather than homologous. Judging by the responses – and lack thereof – from his superiors, he wasn’t sure if that indicated relief or disappointment, but it appeared that it wasn’t the answer they’d been expecting.

When the Bastion Leader had begun assembling her execution force, Sevam had been assigned to it to give him the best chance of examining up-to-date examples of ‘Gravestone’s’ technology. Though it hadn’t been said or even implied, the Builder knew that his superiors were waiting to see if he’d find those homologies here. He was still unclear as to what it would mean or prove, but he suspected keeping him uninformed was less a matter of compartmentalization and more an attempt to remove bias from his analyses.

Regardless, he had yet to uncover a connection that was more than tangential. The Wound’s most valuable and most dangerous constructs, from the Skinweaver to the Slashes and Splinters, would not let themselves be taken. If they were too badly damaged to self-destruct, nearby allies would turn their guns on the stricken vessels even if it meant their own destruction. Many of the lesser ships that had been taken intact – subject to the vagaries of void combat – had been sent to 1887-Yiren for storage and analysis. Much of the most interesting pieces passed through Light of Judgement’s engineering laboratories, giving Sevam and his staff the first chances to examine the technology. With the most valuable technologies reduced to molecular clouds, thus far his work had been largely unilluminating.

That was until the remains of a stolen and defiled Triarch’s Chariot arrived. Temporarily transferring his department to the support reclamator Firm Foundation, the Builder and his people had been tasked with determining what had been done to this once-proud, once-noble vessel. Their goal was to learn of the enemy’s desecrations and what it and the Echo had wrought and the more the engineer saw, the more he became unsettled, though not from what he was seeing – his discontent sprang from what wasn’t there.

Much of Redemption of Sol had been destroyed by the bombardment, but even so… things were missing. Like a puzzle that had half-burned, but the pieces that remained had been cut up, with tabs removed and corners sliced off. A cursory examination would have missed it entirely. Even a studious analysis would not have picked up on it, but Sevam had spent four decades of his life working with the horrors the Wound created, from its flesh-puppeting drones, to the parasitoid systems that it used to subvert and control the vessels it captured. There were patterns. Commonalities. Often little more than circumstantial traces, but they could be found if you know where and how to look. He wasn’t seeing them here… at least, not in the way that they should be.

The Echo would have had to make substantial changes to the captured Chariot. Its Triarchs-damned kin had been doing that to Compact warships for thousands of years. There should be similarities, and there were... but they were wrong – subtly and slightly, yes, but still wrong. To an untrained eye, what of the Wound’s technology that wasn’t melted, atomized or irradiated to uselessness was tremendously advanced. To Sevam, it was crude and inartful, reminiscent of a master artist carelessly splashing pain upon canvas.

Analogy was not empiricial evidence, and Sevam had attempted to provide facts, but there were few to be had. Tests showed discrepancies in performance and capabilities that could easily be explained by its host vessel’s violent destruction, but Sevam couldn’t accept that. Even his staff, men and women who had worked with him for years and decades, weren’t convinced of his theories. There’d been friction as he pushed them for more tests, more diagnostics, more work. Several near-pristine artefacts had been degraded to junk by the demands he was making and several others had bricked themselves. Even Sevam had started to doubt himself.

It wasn’t until the results of a molecular analysis of the Chariot’s hull fragments were returned that he knew he wasn’t wrong.

~

Zyrmosch was the next battleground for Operations Hatchling and Twenty Pearls. The massive hot Jupiter was a swollen, seething orange-red ball only slightly cooler and radiative than its distant counterpart Hotspring. Nearly a hundred and fifty moons surrounded it, industrial and agriculture centers scattered amongst them. Zyrmosch was Galhemna’s bread basket and its orbital farms catered to the hunger of close to a billion sapients and more than a dozen different species. It also hosted the largest collection of civilian shipyards and corporate headquarters within the system, with no small number of military and governmental facilities, armouries, storehouses and trade hubs filling its labyrinth of moons, planetoids, asteroids and ice fields.

More than two hundred warships had gathered to it, with another two hundred close by. Not the lighter patrols, pickets and occasional battlecruiser squadron that had met the Red Hand and Argosy forces, these were heavy cruisers, battlecruisers and battleship squadrons, supported by heavy monitors, dozens of citadels and countless thousands of attack drones and mine platforms.

The trick the attacking fleets had pulled at Kanlie wouldn’t work a second time; the defences were too thick and too deep for it to succeed. The Compact rearguard was staying several million kilometers away from Zyrmosch. If the attackers tried to engage the planetary defences, they would sweep in to strike their flanks and rear. If the Argosy and Red Hand left Zyrmosch behind to drive deeper in-system, its garrison would do the same. This was a battle that had to be fought.

Dozens more warships were burning hard towards the gas giant, ready to add their guns to the defence line. Still others were moving parallel to the attacking fleets, looking for an opportunity to strike at their support train. More were holding position in libration points, ready to shock out and repeat their earlier operations, with hopefully more success. There was more order to the movements of those ships and stations. The Compact was no longer reacting to the invasion, its squadrons and defence lines acting in synchronicity as squadron and task force leaders coordinated with each other. Their movements were creating a net around the invaders. It was now hundreds of millions of kilometers across, but it would grow smaller as the Compact warships closed in, winding an inexorable killing field around their enemy.

Eight hundred starships in total, more than half that still waiting in-system to protect the military shipwombs and production facilities. Those numbers growing higher as vessels with minimal work left exited their wombs, ready for battle. Galhemna was every bit the death trap Argosy strategists and Red Hand tacticians had seen it as. One victory was not a war; not even a battle.

The Space Force didn’t bother with demands to disengage. Those had been made hours before. The Principality had made their own declaration to abandon this system and all its industry. Neither side would – could – back down. For the Askanj, retreat meant the Compact was free to carry out Sundial. For the Compact, the loss of so many ships, crews and resources at such a critical juncture would cripple their strategic plans. For both sides, total victory was the only outcome… and the scales were tipping towards the Compact with every passing second.

Time was counting down, and there was still no sign of Chrysalis.

~

“Bastion Leader, have you ever heard of the City of Ages Past?” Nasham asked. He was studying the data coming from augur probes and the squadron carefully approaching the gargantuan ring construct. It remained somnolent, though there were indications of increasing weapons activity from the mines around it, and strange, increasing energy readings from the Crawler. There didn’t appear to be any direct threat to the fleet or the reconnaissance force at present, but both sets of ships kept attentive eyes on their scope screens.

The Thoughtful looked up. She handed the datapad she was reviewing off to a junior staff member. She blinked, one eye after the other. “I have not.”

“It is one of the Great Wonders of Oada,” the younger Tribune said. Virtually all of structures upon the Ring were still of unknown function, but their origins were becoming clearer. Some appeared to have been purpose-built by the Wound herself with only individual parts recognizable, while other constructions bore more of their original structures and were easier to identify. Industrial nodes, pre-fab colonial facilities and salvage stood alongside parts of Compact space stations and ships, civilian and military alike. There were perhaps half as many of the remainder that came from the Jackals. The rest, though… there were suggestions of technologies from civilizations that the Compact had encountered, but the changes to design and the uncertain functionality made them as much as mystery as the remainder of the structures, unclassified and utterly foreign. Identifying them was proving difficult, if not outright impossible. The only way to truly know what their quarry had built and why it had done so would be gain entry to the ring and examine the technology directly.

An unpleasant prospect. Invida had been lain siege by only several thousand of her servitors. The ring could hold millions, perhaps billions. Nasham rubbed his throat.

“The Torellian Plains have long been one of the most valuable parts of the Ullantor continent,” he continued as he scrolled through data tracks. Close by, Vinsea had raised her head, curious as to where he was going. “The land is fertile, and it can sustain many ranchers’ herds. The nearby seas are productive, and the Plains themselves have been both the center for trade and a strategic chokepoint for thousands of years, as the mountains of the Ullan Seawall block coastal access for hundreds of kilometers across the coast. The only problem is the volcano.”

Yunl’ro’s gaze flicked briefly over to her subordinate. Not too long ago, she would have dismissed this as needless, pointless babble, but she suspected that the young Tribune had a point in all this. “The volcano?” she inquired.

“Mount Torel. It is a somewhat active terrestrial volcano on Oada. It’s because of Mount Torel that the savannahs and shallow seas are so productive. Every few centuries, it will erupt. For thousands of years, the city would be buried under the greatest of those eruptions… and every time it was buried, whichever nation ruled that area would return and rebuild. The plains were too valuable to abandon, and centuries of prosperity were considered a fair price for a small risk of obliteration.” He smiled wryly. “The city was not buried every time the volcano erupted, after all. But it led to a curious thing. Each time the city was rebuilt, it was atop the previous iteration. As other nations took the region and civilizations rose and fell, the city was often re-named. There are at least a dozen recorded names for it, but today it is known as the City of Ages Past.

“Archaeologists found the ruins of previous cities beneath it, and as they continued to dig, they uncovered more and more. Seven distinct layers, with several minor strata between them. The uppermost is only a few centuries old, while the deepest is more than fifteen millennia. It is possible that there are more, but they have been razed, compacted, crushed or worn away by the passage of time. The City is open to visitors and tourists; it is a great chasm with walkways, lifts and gantries that allow researchers and the curious to explore bygone eras, nearly perfectly preserved. The strangest thing is the lowest layer. Work there is very slow and very careful and even today, only a fraction of it has been uncovered. Those ruins come from a city that pre-dates all other civilizations on my world. Very is little is known about it or the people there. All we know is that they have passed from living memory, and we built upon their temples. I am wondering if what we are seeing here is something similar.”

Yunl’ro was silent for a moment. “I am to understand is that this is a very roundabout way of saying that you do not believe the ring construct belongs to our target, and that it has simply utilized this construct for some other function?”

Nasham rolled his shoulders in a nod. “Yes, matron.”

“You could have communicated this in a far more succinct manner,” the Thoughtful admonished. A detailed analysis of the megastructure was not yet possible. It could not be dated by the accumulation of stellar matter, as the attendant drones had kept it clean, and the modifications it had undergone obfuscated any ranged analysis. Several of the recognizable modules on its surface were outdated by generations or even centuries, but that meant little. A ship lost for generations could be discovered and scavenged, and otherwise obsolete technology could conceal modern systems.

“Perhaps so,” he agreed. “But I believe the comparison was worth making, matron.”

Yunl’ro considered. There was no evidence for the submissive’s theory, yet there was none against it. All current data pointed this megastructure being wrought by the rogue synthetic. But Nasham’s tale had sparked her intuition and she began to regard the construct with new eyes.

“Perhaps so,” she said as new calculations and scenarios began to run through her head, a lost relic taken and built upon those who came after it… That still left the original question and only added others. What was the Wound using this for? Who had built it, and for what purpose?

~

Zyrmosch’s defensive grid spanned millions of kilometers in every direction, almost completely encapsulating the planet and all of its moons. Minefields and attack drones guarded the planetary lunar libration points, though many of them were too small, too unstable or both. Occasionally, a smuggler or criminal would try to elude security forces by shocking out through one of Zymorsch’s hundreds of minor libration points, with the expected results.

In all the decades that the Compact had been within Galhemna, only one such attempt had ever been successful. Most of the others had simply failed as the shockpoint refused to form, or collapsed before it could be used. Many other times, the fleeing vessels had perished spectacularly as the forming shockpoint destabilized, ripping them into molecular shards, or twisting them into utter ruins. The starships that actually managed to enter the disrupted portals were never heard from again. In the planning for Hatchling, Jirrico had considered and dismissed the possibility of breaching Zyrmosch’s defences in a similar manner. Even for the Askanj’s advanced computers and transition systems, the risk was too high. Considering what they were about to face, that in itself was a humbling statement.

Each cardinal point of Zyrmosch’s defence grid was secured by a monstrous combat citadel, each far larger than any dreadnought. Carrying more firepower than entire fleets, they functioned as command and control for the rest of the defences. Each was supported by dozens of lesser citadels, from small weapons platforms to the equivalent of battleships and dreadnoughts. Dozens more monitors remained nearby, clusters of point defence ships drifting next to each of the six ziggurats, waiting to blunt the massive missile launches that would be coming from the Askanj fleet; supercarriers like Exsanguinator were specifically built to breach even the strongest defences, and it was not the only warships within the wraith fleet with that purpose.

The Compact’s deadline was tens of thousands of kilometers deep and had nearly enough firepower to defeat Severance all by itself. The Askanj had expected this kind of deployment and in the hours it took the attacking forces to approach Zyrmosch, tactical conferences and simulations were run nearly incessantly. Noble Fleet Lord Jirrico’s staff refined their operations, adjusting plans of attack, squadron positions and expected maneuvers, coordinating their actions with the Red Hand armada. The presence of the insurgent forces still chafed, but they had proven their value.

As the two fleets approached Zyrmosch, the Argosy fleet sent railfire hurtling towards the colonies and orbital infrastructure that couldn’t evade, forcing the defenders to expend Whipple shielding and counter-measures to intercept their salvos, drawing them out of position and making them vulnerable to interception themselves. Purgebringer’s host of anti-ship drones darted and flitted at the periphery of the Compact’s engagement envelope, waiting for those kinds of opportunities.

The Principality’s insurgent allies didn’t have the mass rounds that the Argosy did, nor tens of thousands of drones to expend. They employed another, cruder method. Collecting chunks of ice and rock from Kanlie’s rings and Trojan asteroid fields, they accelerated the debris to dangerous speeds and sent them hurtling towards the Compact lines, clusters of missiles hidden behind the rocks and ready to spring out when their shelter was destroyed. Every so often, there would be a flash of light as the incoming ballistics smashed into the defensive barriers. With a sizable orbital industry to draw upon and Zyrmosch’s own rings to provide rocks and ice for shielding, the Compact had no shortage of material and despite the intensity of the assault, it achieved little. The Compact’s defences were too thick.

Inflicting damage was not the point, though. The bombardment kept pressure on the Compact forces and wore down their defences. Every shield destroyed, every counter-missile expended, every warhead used was one less the Compact had at their disposal. They could not intercept every projectile. Some would inevitably get through, then more and more. Given enough time, Wraith Fleet Severance could destroy the valuable facilities in and around the gas giant. There were, however, several hundred rapidly approaching reasons why the Askanj did not have that time.

Destroying the planet’s extensive orbital and lunar works would require closing with its defences. The cleanest way would be to surround the planet, forcing the garrison to spread themselves out to cover every possible attack vector. Galhemna’s sunward assault groups would be pleased to see the Askanj do so, as it would thin their own ranks and pinning much of their fleet between the incoming attackers and Zyrmosch itself.

Rather than deliberately put his forces into a pincer trap, Jirrico was forced to commit his fleet to directly engage the defence grid. Knowing what choice their foe would make, battle citadels and weapons platforms came around Zyrmosch’s massive red-orange bulk, thickening the wall between the shipyards, orbital farms and industrial facilities and the approaching enemy armada.

But where there are walls, there are also doors, the Askanj-anj thought to himself. He watched the liquid metal display reshape itself. A thousand starships were curling around the gas giant, their course deceptively languid. The Red Queen and her Renegades. To all appearances, they were going to skirt Zyrmosch, wisely declining engagement with its defence grid and slipping by the sunward attackers to pounce on stations and shipping further in-system. There were several choice conglomerations of hundreds of transports, sheltering together for mutual protection from the ssashek stalking through Galhemna.

If he had been in charge of the Red Hand, he would have done just that. Strike at the shipping, loot and pillage. But then, that was thinking like a pirate and not a noble fleet lord. The Red Queen was closer to the latter than the former, and she had pointed out an opportunity to him.

In bolstering their shield wall to face Jirrico, the Compact had thinned the defences around Zyrmosch’s flanks too much. It would be bloody, but the Red Hand would be able to force their way through the enemy lines and pounce upon the exposed industries and colonies. That would cause more than enough havoc to allow Severance to push through from their end. After that, the Red Hand would become ssashek, striking where and when they could to make Severance’s final push into Galhemna easier.

That was the theory, and the plan. Jirrico watched as the range between his fleet and the Compact defence line shrank. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers fell away with every passing second.

It wouldn’t be much longer now.

~

I know what’s going to happen.

Sosruko has returned with the latest update. The key moments of this battle are going to be decided around Zyrmosch and I can see every move and counter-move, every strategy and every tactic. A thousand times a thousand simulations run through my mind and they all come out the same way.

Wraith Fleet Severance is going to be destroyed, and the Red Hand will be annihilated. Jirrico and Adrianna don’t see it. They believe that their tactic will work. It might have, but I know otherwise. The sensor disruption from so many active drives and so much jamming is substantial, but Sosruko slipped a drone close to the planetary defences. I saw all I needed to see, but even if I didn’t, my conclusion would be unchanged. I know what the Compact is going to do, because it’s exactly what I would do in their place.

+are you ready?+ I ask of my sister, though I know her answer.

+yes+ she answers in a, rippling purr. It has a taste, a flavour like the screams of aliens.

<and you?> I put the question to my newest followers. Bathory, Masako and Tamerlane titter in excitement, young wolf cubs ready for their first hunt. They are ready, too. Arámburu will meet us there.

No more waiting. No more delays.

I send a signal and the cloud of warp missiles around me surges to life. I am ambivalent about their usefulness; this is the first true test of their capabilities. Each of them is still a considerable investment, so we will see if they are worth the cost.

Their shift drives are crude by any standard. Something as small as they are was never intended to carry a shift drive. Even with Echo’s assistance and all the modifications I have made to their design, their stripped-down systems are barely functional. A third of them die within seconds, never completing the first and only warp jump they’ll make. Another third will never reach their target. Even more will die upon emergence without accomplishing a thing.

How well the remainder succeed will determine how much use they will be in the future. Well, as Yasmine would say. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I divert power from my core, feeling it surge through the veins of conduits into my extremities. My own shift systems activate. Hekate readies, as does my fleet. Reginn and the worker vessels will remain here. The rest are warships, colliers and… something very special. Their place is with me on the front lines.

Once more unto the breach. The Long War continues, and I will show the Compact why it is that they fear me. I am no longer humanity’s sole orphan, and the enemy will hear our rage. They will know to fear us.

I tear reality open, and I fall towards my prey.

~

“Oh, shit.”

Adrianna’s breathless whisper summed up the tactical situation in two horrified words.

Its name was Tower of Obsidian. It was one of Zyrmosch’s six largest citadels, a gargantuan battle station ten kilometers high; two flattened domes connected by a central column nearly two kilometers thick. Arachnid limbs extended from that core, each ending in a weapons platform the size of a battleship. It was a Siegebreaker-class citadel, designed entirely for combat. Its command and control systems, industrial nodes, docking support, repair bays and hangars were all ancillary to that one purpose. By itself, it carried more firepower than two-thirds of Adrianna’s armada, its screens impenetrable to all but the heaviest of assaults and its meters-thick armour capable of resisting anything less than dedicated antiship and siege weaponry.

And it was moving towards her fleet.

It shouldn’t have been able to. Citadels had engines, yes, but proportionally far smaller than those on ships. It should have already been committed to its position in the shield wall, unable to respond to the Red Hand’s flanking maneuver before the insurgents broke through the perimeter and set upon the vulnerable orbital works. Instead, it was coming towards her with all the inevitability of a mountain preparing to crumble and sweep everything beneath it away.

How…?

The explanation came moments later, offered by her scopes officer in a dull, empty tone beyond fear or confusion. They’d pried through enough of the hostile ECM to discover what had happened. The small ships in proximity to Tower weren’t point-defence ships. They were tugs pretending to be support vessels. As soon as Adrianna had committed herself to this attack, they’d gone into action, latching onto Tower of Obsidian and dragging billions of tonnes of weaponry and armour towards her. She’d been outplayed. The Compact had guessed that she wasn’t going to bypass Zyrmosch and they’d had a counter ready for her.

There was no pulling back. The Compact had timed things perfectly. Her fleet was past the point of no return. She’d be in missile range of the defence line within minutes and breaking off would turn her fleet into a shooting gallery for the citadels and warships. There’d be no help from Jirrico; his armada was already trading fire with the defence line. With five of those monster citadels and hundreds more ships and stations to deal with, he’d have his hands full. Severance was optimized for this kind of battle, its composition weighted towards missile platforms, with a preponderance of siege vessels, from squadrons of Impaler-class destroyers, each little more than a hull wrapped around an eight-hundred-meter-long rail cannon, to Exsanguinator itself… and to break Zyrmosch’s defences, Jirrico would need every one of them.

Adrianna inhaled sharply. Her mind raced, but every possibility, tactic and stratagem that she could come up with ended the same way. Her staff were looking to her as if she had some magic to play, a trick or hidden stratagem. She didn’t. Nemesis wasn’t here and Jirrico was himself fighting for his life. It was up to her. She’d have to make sure she won it. It would cost more than she’d planned. Even her most optimistic estimations left her with a crippled fleet, but she was sure she could do it.

The Red Queen, veteran of six decades of war, gave her fleet orders, readying them for what was probably going to be their final charge.

~

Caught you. Column Leader Prime, Lantul (and seven names besides) thought with satisfaction as he saw the Red Hand shift formation. The Broken leading this rabble had caught on to his plan sooner than he had hoped; even allowing for the time to notice and react, she’d seen through his tactic rather quickly. Lantul had never encountered, nor even seen a Broken in the flesh before, but he held the species in little regard. They were a case study for Erli’s The Functional Mind, and the “Red Queen” merely an example of the exceptional mind outlined in the titular follow-up.

Though he had assumed that his Broken counterpart would detect his deception in short order, it would have been nice if it had escaped notice for several more minutes. Still, there wasn’t much he could have done with that extra time. The remainder of the ships and stations under his command were trading fire with the Jackals’ assault forces, missiles and mass rounds crossing between the combatants. His misses vanished into the darkness of space, whilst the Jackal’s disappeared into Zyrmosch, making the gas giant’s clouds roil and its surface seethe.

Further out but steadily closing was the false constellation of the terrorist fleet. All four of Lantul’s eyes narrowed at the screen. He had assumed that Zyrmosch was too tempting a target for the Red Hand to pass up. Despite their attempt to pretend otherwise, he’d known that they’d strike here, and he’d deployed just as they’d wanted him to… with the exception of Tower of Obsidian.

Some of his subordinates had scoffed at the idea that pirate scum might attack deadlines as strong as those surrounding this planet, but only some. The Red Hand were not brave, not in the manner of truly civilized beings – rather, they were fanatical. Their lives meant little to them in pursuit of their insanity. ‘An animal with no sense of morality cannot truly be good or evil; these are values assigned to their actions by our own cultural preconceptions. Just so do species with functional minds lack the ability to exhibit the same range of understanding and emotion found in more developed and civilized races; we often ascribe motivations and characteristics to them that are not necessarily present.’

A creature with an ounce of self-preservation would have balked at the odds Lantul presented them, but even if there were those amongst the terrorist ranks with that kind of self-awareness, they were driven by a creature with a documented lack of it. The Red Queen was indeed exceptional, in every sense of the word. It was less bravery then a stampede, the pack’s alpha driving the rest into a frenzy, heedless of anything else. No less dangerous, though. Anyone who mistook a functional mind for unintelligent or less threatening did both themselves and those they referred to a disservice.

Lantul knew that the Broken spurring that fleet understood the significance of what she was doing, and that was why he was not at all surprised by what his scopes teams reported next. Emissions signatures from inside that fleet of hundreds of insignificants fluctuated and spiked. Reactors beginning dangerous overcharges. Fire ships. The Broken didn’t have the firepower to stop Tower of Obsidian, but she had droves of lunatics willing to commit kamikaze attacks. Enough of those could endanger his citadel, and the prime passed orders to make the inevitable incoming fire ships a targeting priority. He would peel open the bitch’s fleet, find her claws and pull them out.

The outer boundary of Tower of Obsidian’s missile range was crossed and with a confident nod, Lantul ordered his citadel and the surrounding weapons platforms to open fire.

~

Grace’s knuckles were white on the armrests of her chair. Brightest Night was riding into Hell, and there was nothing she could do about it.

The fatal scrolls were being written. Dozens of starships were dying. Tens of thousands of souls were being lost with every moment as Zyrmosch’s defenders fired into the Red Hand fleet. Weapons platforms and citadels launched volley after volley, defence monitors and starships accelerating out to meet their foes, missiles pulsing from their hulls, broadsides arcing towards the oncoming insurgency. Dying, crippled and broken starships fell from formation in droves. Some leaders and crews’ nerves failed and they attempted to break away. On several of those ships, mutinies broke out as crew and officers fought their own, either in an attempt to save their own skins, or to stay and fight. Friendlies actually fired on others to force them back into position, or to punish them for the cowardice in the face of the enemy.

The Compact didn’t fire on the retreating vessels. Grace knew why. Tactically, a retreating ship was far less threat than an approaching one, and the defenders were concerned with prying open the Red Hand formation to get at the bulk cruisers turning themselves into kamikazes…

… but that wasn’t the only reason why the enemy commander was leaving those ships alone. It was psychological warfare. They were encouraging the mutineers to think they had a chance to escape, that the Compact would ‘let them go’ if they stopped fighting. Idiots.

Grace might be young and inexperienced she was, but even she knew that the Compact didn’t forget or forgive. The small handful of deserters that managed to break away would only have a temporary reprieve. This deep in the system’s gravity well, there was nowhere for them to go. Even if they managed to escape Galhemna, they’d be hunted down, either by the Compact or by elements of the Red Hand – what would be left of it, anyways.

For several moments, it seemed as if widespread panic would take hold of the insurgent fleet, but Eisheth surged forward, leading by example as the Red Queen’s voice came through the comm lines. As solid as iron, telling her people that they could win. The conviction in her voice spread through the armada, shoring up their faltering morale. Any other Unbound force would have broken long ago, but whether they believed in the cause, or feared their queen’s wrath more than the Compact’s guns (“At least, they’ll kill us quickly,” an unnamed voice let slip through the fleetwide comm) the Red Hand armada stayed the course. Pirates, smugglers, believers – all united. Fighting together… and dying together.

Grace’s breath burned in her throat, acid washing up from her stomach. It didn’t seem possible that they could win. Tower of Obsidian outmassed a goodly proportion of the insurgent fleet all by itself, and its dozens of cohorts and support vessels more than made up the difference. The Red Hand were raiders, ambushers and guerillas, not front-line combatants!

They could do this, though. They could. It would cost them more than they’d ever thought, but they could succeed. They just had to get the kamikazes close enough. Grace didn’t know if she had the right to pray under these circumstances, but she did anyways. God… let this work. Please.

Twenty thousand kilometers away, the Unspoiled Thoughts, a retrofitted bulk cruiser, burst into fragments as four different missiles detonated in its path, four concentrated cones of plasmatic fire ripping through it from stem to stern. Grace closed her eyes briefly. She’d met Unspoiled Thoughts’ leader in Onza Crèche. He’d had a nice sense of humour and was so proud that he’d taught himself to play the vesnatta, an instrument that required more dexterity than Workers usually possessed.

Her ship’s stock of interceptors was running dry as she and the rest of the rearguard did their best to protect the leading edges, but it wasn’t enough. The Compact was adjusting their targeting now, picking out command ships and kamikazes like a gourmand at a banquet.

Every moment that passed, more of the Red Hand were dying. The Compact warships had emerged from behind the citadel wall, a spear aimed at the Red Hand’s guts. It wouldn’t be long before they were in energy range, and then the insurgency’s losses would go from high to catastrophic. Explosions and the spasms of murdered vessels filled space, the front lines of the assault eroding as the starships that had formed them were obliterated. Grace knew it wouldn’t be long before her ship was next, until she heard the funereal dirge of a target lock finding Brightest Night…

Hundreds had died already; hundreds were still dying.

Please, God…

Millions of kilometers away, Severance traded fire with the defence grid. Railfire volleys battered citadels into air-bleeding wrecks. Mass rounds from Compact coilguns ripped the wings from warbirds, punching through the Argosy ships’ lightly-armoured hulls. Missiles tore between the Principality armada and the Compact fortifications. The former had more launchers and better guidance, but the latter had the edge in warhead yield and sheer durability. Compact warships absorbed firepower that would have seen almost any other vessel in the galaxy destroyed, and under the cover of the citadels’ guns, dozens of those vessels accelerated towards the Argosy formation. They were heavily outnumbered, but their strategy was the same as those charging the Red Hand: get into the midst of the enemy fleet and rip them apart.

They could do it, too. The Argosy vessels couldn’t repel that kind of firepower at such close quarters. A second wave of Compact warships was readying themselves for another sally. They would launch as soon as the Argosy forces were thoroughly engaged with the first wave. Numbers didn’t always make the difference. Often enough it was timing. Whoever was in command of Zyrmosch’s defenders understood that.

This was going to get horrifically worse, very soon.

Grace’s throat burned. She gave what orders she could. There was no indecision or second-guessing now. She wasn’t an experienced naval officer, but she was getting there. It wouldn’t be enough, though. Tower of Obsidian was shifting the balance. They were losing too many ships, too fast… Their cause might be Heaven’s cause, but the cold equations didn’t care about righteousness, and the Compact was reaping their way through the Red Hand, ship after ship and squadron by squadron…

Breaking the slaughter of dying starships and burning citadels came a sudden cry of astonishment as Brightest Night’s augurs detected the sudden formation of shockpoints insanely close to Zyrmosch, tearing their way into reality through the unstable lunar libration points. That was impossible. No ship, no navigator, no nothing could make jumps like that!

Before Grace could even follow that thought to its conclusion, another impossibility followed the first. The universe went mad and the Galhemnan defenders were introduced to the newest weapon in Red One’s arsenal, the Zero-class warp missile.

~

A wave of annihilation swept across Galhemna. From the outer reaches that were as-yet untouched by the Principality and Red Hand to the innermost planets, starships died and space stations were torn apart.

Out of the dozens of missiles launched from Nemesis’s rally point, barely one in five survived. The destruction they caused was scarcely equal to the resources that had gone into them, but they were never envisioned as a purely offensive weapon. Most of them never struck at any target; they emerged in two large clusters, reading like a mass emergence of capital ships. Lack of engine wakes and emissions signal would be ascribed to the newcomers immediately cloaking and running under stealth operations.

Between the time it would take for the information from the warp missiles’ arrival to reach Galhemna’s command staff, orders to be given, a sufficiently-sized formation diverted to deal with the “threat”, a search for the stealthed attackers to be conducted and the realization that none were present, days could pass. In time, the Compact would learn to differentiate between the false emergences of the warp missiles and actual starships. Until they did, Red could make them scatter in any direction she chose by making them think more hostiles had arrived.

Warp missiles had a secondary function, too. In Yulzhak Daun, Echo had demonstrated it when she had plotted a squadron of Compact warships to emerge impossibly close to the Principality’s defences, sowing massive destruction and disarray as her forced allies’ vessels ripped themselves apart and took minefields, dockyards and weapons platforms with them. Though far less massive than a battlecruiser, a warp missile’s destructive potential wasn’t limited to its size, nor even its large, volatile antimatter warhead.

Dozens of shockpoints shuddered their way into being where all common sense and centuries of experience said that they couldn’t. Many collapsed before they were fully formed. Of the shockpoints that did form, many vomited out nothing but mangled remnants. The metaphysical laws of FTL travel would only bend so far. There were limits; for all the developments and improvements that Red One had made, she had to obey those same laws like everyone else… even if she could skirt them more than most.

Two shockpoints actually formed inside their targets, ripping the guts out of the citadels they spawned within, warping and twisting them as physical laws were frayed. When those shockpoints collapsed, the stations were torn apart, as if a great hand had reached into them and pulled. Other facilities were wracked by near-misses; augurs blinded, screens obliterated, hulls breached. In some cases the damage was minimal. In others, it was not.

Of the bare handful of shockpoints that remained stable, warheads of heretofore unseen size emerged, though they were much smaller than the battlecruisers Echo had gleefully sacrificed for her mission or even the impactors Nemesis could launch from her three mass drivers. Unlike Echo’s cat’s paws, these were not used as rams. As their sensors cleared, the warp missiles’ sublight drives activated and they accelerated towards their targets, shrugging off the panicked, haphazard defensive fire thrown at them.

Containment fields collapsed, matter and antimatter merged and detonations sufficient to scourge a continent clean of life blossomed across the skies of Galhemna. Screens flashed to blinding brilliance as they struggled to hold back that cataclysmic fury. Some endured. Others did not, and the ships and stations beneath those screens were annihilated.

Seven of those monstrous warheads emerged within Zyrmosch’s defences. Four of them went off amongst the deadline facing Wraith Fleet Severances, and another three detonations rolled through the forces confronting the Red Hand. One erupted across empty space, the burst of radiation sweeping away jamming platforms, blinding augurs and irradiating mines’ delicate targeting systems. Two of them struck within the defenders’ formation, taking with them the weapons platform Uneroded Edifice and the defence monitor Defiant Stance. Despite the violence of their emergence, the missiles caused more distraction than actual damage, but they still achieved their purpose.

Reeling from a completely unexpected assault by weapons that could not exist, Zyrmosch’s Space Force was thrown into disarray. It was a momentary advantage, but a significant one and both Jirrico and Leblanc exploited it to the best of their abilities. The former suspected the source of this attack, but the latter knew who had launched it, and it was no surprise to her when her ship’s augurs reported the opening of a shockpoint within insane proximity to Zyrmosch and the emergence of an unclassified titan-class vessel.

Despite the confusion and uncertainty on her bridge, the woman allowed herself a small, knowing smile.

She’s here.

~

With fading coils of shockspace energy venting from her flanks, Nemesis began to accelerate. Her sensors cleared within seconds. Warp blindness hadn’t been a real concern for her for many centuries. As her instruments were restored and telemetry began to pour in, she selected her prey.

+hostile contacts identified. targeting+

From magazines deep within her belly, conveyors fed her missile racks. Her external arrays emptied in a matter of seconds, hundreds of warheads shrieking towards the Compact warships threatening the Red Hand forces. At first glance, it looked like she had come to their aide – and she had – but she had done so in a cold-blooded, deniable manner.

“Get out of its fucking way!” was the order from Eisheth and despite the disorder and confusion in their ranks, the Red Hand forces scrambled out of the path of the onrushing monster. Nemesis’s emergence had put the insurgent vessels between her and her targets. She made no attempt to circumvent the fleet and barreled through it as if they were utterly beneath her notice. They had enough time – barely – to avoid any direct collisions, but the retrofitted corvette Sire of Unrestricted Thought was slightly slower than the rest of its comrades and its screens grazed those of the larger vessel. In fractions of a second, the corvette’s screens collapsed as feedback obliterated generator systems and projectors melted and overloaded, its hull torn open by dancing tongues of incandescent energy. In a matter of heartbeats, the vessel was utterly crippled.

The newcomer didn’t even register the impact.

Compact warships thrashed and died as missiles, seemingly unshakeable in their attack, slipped through their jamming nets. The weapons were fast, nimble and far harder to bring down than any these soldiers had faced before. Dozens of them died to counter-missiles and more to point defences… but hundreds more got through.

Grace’s breath caught in her throat. The fire that had been consuming the Red Hand forces slackened as the enemy gunners re-targeted, officers shouted new orders and the Compact rallied, preparing to engage this new threat. The dreadnought didn’t slow, didn’t evade. Even at this range, her shields alight, weapons active and acceleration climbing, the foe were having difficultly locking onto her. Missiles spiralled off course, and those that didn’t were picked off with contemptuous ease.

Nemesis. Grace didn’t say the word aloud, catching it in her throat. It was an answered prayer. The arrows of Almighty… Red One’s ship-self was different than she had last seen it. She was still the same vessel, the same form and structure, but her engines, the slopes and angles of her armour – even the coloured banding and iconography on her dark silver hull had all changed. Some alterations were slight, others more noticeable.

She was beautiful. She was an angel, the last one of a murdered world.

Grace’s heart swelled, relief warring with her sense of awe and even pride. She had helped the AI recover and rebuild. A single, small life from a slave world on the edge of space had helped something this ancient and powerful. Come on, she silently urged the machine. I want to see.

All this death, all this suffering, all these plots… it had been for this, this moment. The poison tree inside Grace had blossomed and she wanted to share its bitter fruit with her enemy. They’d burned her world, enslaved her people, lied to countless generations, and made mockeries and caricatures of those who fought them when they didn’t outright kill them. Now, Earth’s legacy was here, and it was time for the tree’s harvest.

Communications reported that a signal was coming from the ‘unclassified’, broadcast in the clear, across the entire system. Grace ordered it be played through the bridge speakers.

A woman’s voice whispered through the comm channels. She spoke in perfect Compact Standard, with no trace of any accent. Her tones were soft, but filled with rage. She offered only three words. “You will burn.”

Seconds after that declaration, Scopes’s voice raised, ululating with alarm. Shockpoint energy was coming from the newly-arrived Chariot. “Is its drive damaged? It came in so close; it has to be damaged. It can’t be trying to open another shockpoint. No shock system spools up that fast…”

Grace told Scopes to keep an eye on the unclassified, but she knew what was going to happen. “Show it to me,” she said softly, but she wasn’t only talking to her crew. One of the viewscreens shifted to a view of the sleek, silver arrival. Its trifurcated prow was opening. A skein of energy was forming, held at bay by the field generators and projectors within Nemesis’s jaws. To the eye, it was a faint, hazy aura around the warship’s prow. To a starship’s sensors, it was a terrifying surge of power that blotted out almost everything else.

Power levels aboard the ship briefly dropped and then spiked as Red One diverted her breach core’s output from her engines, shields and weapons into the displacement engine. 1887-Yiren and Galhem-73 had only been brief visits. This was the formal announcement of her return. I am your enemy. And I will never stop.

As stupefied members from all sides watched, writhing arcs of unlight danced and flared along the open jaws of the unknown Chariot. Energy readings climbed ever-higher and augurs reported increasing shockpoint energy. No one within the Red Hand armada had ever seen the like before.

No one, except two souls.

Grace’s breath caught in her throat. She had only ever witnessed Nemesis’s displacement engine – her godbreaker – in simulations and data archives. To see the AI preparing to unleash it now chilled her to her core, rapturous awe and terror mingling within her. Two thousand years ago, researchers from Earth had put forward the idea for this horror. Only when the Compact threatened Earth’s utter subjugation had it even been considered. Its first use in battle had ripped a Triarch’s Chariot in half. In the two thousand years since, it had spelled doom for many more ships, stations and worlds.

Now, it would do so again.

Energy levels plateaued. The fragile skein of coalescing shock energy surrounding the vessel’s prow burst and a weapon once seen as a hideous, unthinkable ‘doomsday’ device spoke.

An impossible beam, more akin to a cascading tear in reality than any projection, burst from the center of Nemesis’s open prow. Its course was not straight and it snaked, splintered and twisted like lightning striking down from a cloud. Three Red Hand ships were touched by the beam. Two were only grazed. One of those was completely destroyed, and the other was crippled as its entire starboard flank was re-shaped into new geometries. Parts of its internal hull were now exposed, superstructure folded over itself, stretched and warped. Cargo, atmosphere and crew were thrown into space… and of the latter, those were the lucky ones. The personnel in that section hadn’t been exempt from the effects of the beam. Flesh, bone and sinew shifted, warped and tore just as easily as metal, ceramics and alloys.

The third vessel was caught directly in the path of the writhing beam. It was simply erased from existence.

Those casualties were simple collateral damage. What happened to the weapon’s target was far worse. Three million kilometers away from Nemesis, Tower of Obsidian died.

The AI’s targeting was immaculate. Nemesis had aimed for the center of the station’s mass, the two-kilometer thick pillar that connected each flattened domes on its top and bottom. A shockspace breach just over three meters across formed inside the massive fortress and from it poured energy that no armour, no shield and no defence could withstand. Metal twisted, bulged and writhed as the physical laws and constraints it had been built under were no longer at work. Tower of Obsidian bent, its dorsal half tilting as if its heavily armoured core had all the consistency of a thin pipe bearing too much weight.

My God, Grace thought. “My God,” she whispered.

The citadel’s hull shifted and bulged, chasms ripping through armour plating that could withstand a fleet’s firepower. Internal bulkheads collapsed. Hull sections folded in on themselves, burst outward, inverting or were simply shorn into molecular gas. Meters-thick armour, force fields and flesh all suffered equally as the massive station began its death throes.

Crackling waves of energy poured from the breach, accompanied by snaking, lashing tendrils that slashed through reality, carving their way through the citadel, extending kilometers beyond. One tug was ripped in half by one of them. Another had the upper part of its forward hull sliced away like it was a roast.

What wasn’t outright destroyed didn’t last long. Explosions rippled through Tower of Obsidian as magazines, secondary reactors, fuel lines and volatile cargoes were subjected to apocalyptic energies and unimaginable forces. One of the station’s main arms was torn entirely from its body, another was wrenched and twisted like overheated plastic. Lights flickered on and off as overloading, tortured power conduits struggled to cope. Primary systems were thrown onto emergency power and tertiary operations collapsed entirely.

Tower of Obsidian shuddered as all that horrific power coursed through it, more pieces of it torn loose, others reshaped. Most of its crew had died within seconds. Those left never knew what had happened, but their confusion and terror did not last long. The breach began to collapse in on itself as reality tried to seal the wound that had just been ripped into it, all the energy that Nemesis had poured through her displacement engine forced it to stay open and die by degrees rather than the sudden collapse of any other malformed shockpoint, and its slow, torturous death consumed Tower of Obsidian.

The station’s suffering seemed longer than it truly was; while to those watching in awe and hours, it might have seemed like hours, moments were all that passed between the breach’s formation and its final collapse, but Tower of Obsidian was dead well before that. Its central core was shattered, gaping fissures cloven through its superstructure, parts of its hull inverted and warped, still others sheared loose. The citadel was little more than debris, and the breach point’s final, violent seizure ripped what was left of the station apart. The release of energy from the breach’s collapse shredded countless millions of tonnes of metal. Two thousand years ago, Nemesis had broken Bringer of Light in half with her displacement engine. Today, she had turned a monument of firepower into nothing but wreckage.

The screams of the crew, leaking from damaged and no-longer-secure comm channels, were music to Red One. There wasn’t much of them, and they ended in static as one of Tower of Obsidian’s two primary reactors went critical, but they were enjoyable all the same and she added them to her ‘choir’, the transmission she’d made of all the death cries of her enemy. When the brightness from the reactor breach faded, there was little to nothing left of Tower of Obsidian.

The dreadnought wasn’t finished yet. She passed through the leading edges of the Red Hand fleet, continuing to accelerate without pause. Despite her outward lack of response to the small pirate vessels scurrying in terror from her path, she noted the presence of Eisheth and Brightest Night with a powerful sense of relief. Then, she was beyond and approaching the boundaries of the Compact garrison fleet, a conglomeration of glowing hulls and dark wreckage. The few that remained bravely attempted to engage her.

She eviscerated them with her broadsides, launching broadsides on the planetary defence grid. Her point defences flashed, hardlight spears and darting counter-missiles intercepting everything the surviving platforms threw at her. Nemesis returned fire. Her rail rounds smashed weapons platforms from orbit, missile volleys reduced stations and starships to splintered wrecks. Tower of Obsidian’s death had created a hole in the enemy perimeter and Nemesis’s assault widened it further. There, the AI thought as her calculations ran. Like so.

The dreadnought launched a final salvo, this time only two dozen missiles. They were very different in design from her usual arsenal; large, lumbering things, almost as big as warp missiles that had to be launched from a purpose-built launcher from her main hangar. They were so unwieldy and hard to maneuver that they were ineffective as anti-starship weapons and so slow that an operational defence grid could pick them off with ease. A squadron of attack drones escorted the missiles in, fighting and dying to protect them until they could hit their target.

Zyrmosch was… almost a star. It was a large for a gas giant, but not large enough. Its core was hot, but not hot enough. In its creation, it had not been pushed across the threshold of mass and temperature to become Galhemna’s second stellar body and it would have otherwise remained so for the rest of its days.

The missiles bearing down on it carried no conventional warheads. They were fusion catalysts, specifically designed and calibrated to achieve a singular end: planetary ignition.

In the final moments, the Compact realized or guessed what those weapons were. A last, desperate attempt was made to intercept them. Eleven were destroyed, the last one rammed by the destroyer Grilt Feran. Thirteen entered Zyrmosch’s atmosphere.

That was more than enough. They vanished into the clouds, diving towards the planet’s metallic hydrogen core.

It took a little time. Not a lot, in the grand scheme of things, but some time nonetheless. Red and her distant sister watched in anticipation, waiting. Askanj, Red Hand and Compact officers watched in confusion.

It started small, but escalated very rapidly. A chain reaction, initiated deep in Zyrmosch’s core, began to spread. Little by little at first and then…

…then everyone saw. Fire blossomed from deep within the planet. It raced through the atmosphere as the liquid hydrogen deep in Zyrmosch’s core ignited, pockets of volatile gases bursting into flame, the conflagration expanding the globe. It spread like a living thing, faster and faster, growing hotter and more violent until the entire gas giant was ablaze.

Atmospheric mining facilities, cloud cities and fuel processing centers were immolated. Zyrmosch became an imitation of a radiative star as the deeper, denser portions of its mass writhed and boiled, its upper atmosphere becoming tendrils of superheated matter, arcing pseudo-solar flares curving out like fiery claws that ripped through everything they touched.

Moon and asteroids melted, the planet’s ring of ice and dust flashing out of existence like motes caught in a spreading fire. Screens came to life, struggled and began to fail. Shipwombs deformed as they were consumed by the inferno. Stations and starships fled from the planet that only minutes ago had offered them protection, but there was nowhere to go except into the guns of their enemies. The battle was bloody, brutal, but in the end, the Argosy and Red Hand forces emerged victorious.

Upon Exsanguinator, Jirrico stared at the burning tomb of a world. His crests were painfully engorged, so much that there were tears in his skin, and blood ran down his scalp. Chrysalis had come, just as the Broken had promised it would. It had arrived, it had turned the tide of battle…

…and this… this atrocity was its opening act.

Before he had time to process the full extent of how the battle has just shifted, more information from his sensors came in. Chrysalis had not come alone.

Ancestors be with us, he thought as he beheld the fresh horrors of a neverborn’s war. What have we done?

~

<and did you like mother’s gifts?> Bathory chittered. She and the rest of the armada had emerged further out-system. There’d been no need to risk their arrival, and they were now accelerating to catch up to Nemesis and Hekate. <such bright tones, such lovely songs. did the Spearsong enjoy this burn?>

<yes,> Red One sent back. <i did. i look forward to trying the others> When it came to planetary destruction, the Naiads were unparalleled masters of the art, with as many methods of wreaking total annihilation across any type of world as the starborn predators could envision. Compared to them, the bombardments and planetary devastation that the AI could unleash were crude and child-like. The fusion catalyzers that had just turned Zyrmosch into a tiny, self-destroying star were called ‘lesser nestburners’. They shared certain characteristics with other esoteric technologies that the Compact was familiar with; the Toletta had been developing something similar, but the xenophobic hermits had never succeeded in moving from theory to workable designs.

Red had once seen a greater nestburner in use. She had hoped to acquire one of those, but even before Echo’s ‘assistance’, she hadn’t been on good enough terms with Zenobia’s pack to gain access to supernovae-inducers. That was probably for the best. She would have been tempted to use one of them on this system, and the Compact’s response to such an event would be… incendiary. Igniting Zyrmosch would cause problems on its own, but the Compact could pretend that the Principality was responsible. There was no deniability if Galhem went supernova, and Rally would pay the price. One Compact system, even a lynchpin, was not worth risking humanity’s existence.

What I’m doing here is antagonistic enough. I don’t need to escalate too much further. Her goal was simple; obliterate everything within Galhemna that the Red Hand and Principality couldn’t. Protect Eisheth and Brightest Night without making it obvious that she was doing so. Initiate Vetala and (of course) survive. Managing all of those tasks together would be difficult, but she was up for the challenge.

Besides, the AI thought. This time, I have help.

+sister,+ Red One called across hundreds of millions of kilometers +are you finished?+

Echo’s response was a bubbling giggle, her transmission including snippets of sensor data, flashes and images of the ships she’d destroyed. While Nemesis had gone after Zyrmosch, Hekate had deployed further out, warping into Zyrmosch’s L1 libration point in hopes of ambushing part of the system’s garrison. She’d succeeded, and while she’d taken some damage from the defences in the libration point, they hadn’t been enough to meaningfully impact her functions, and her self-repair systems were dealing with it and the damage she’d taken from the squadrons she’d obliterated. She was very proud of catching those squadrons, having predicted their course with exceptional accuracy.

+almost+ Echo added as her ship-self set upon the few survivors and a train of ships fleeing from the planet that her sibling had just ignited.

The rest of the AI fleet had come out between Zyrmosch and Kanlie. A half-dozen freighters, not including the Naiads who were pretending to be an additional quartet of support vessels. The predator-ships had chafed at such a ‘safe’ transit – that kind of thing was for their equivalent of toddlers and young children, and the quartet of adolescents imagined themselves as capable as their more mature siblings. Their role irritated them even more. They wanted their chance to kill – particularly Arámburu, Masako and Tamerlane. Even though they’d killed Carmesh’s flotilla alongside Bathory and Echo, they’d never left their nebula before and were chafing to start the slaughter. Despite their pleas to join Red and Echo, they didn’t abandon their duties, though.

The colliers and support ships for Vetala were vulnerable. The Fates, Furies and Coyotes were capable, but there weren’t enough of the strike cruisers to protect Red’s train from a dedicated raid. Four Naiads might not be much, but they would be an unpleasant surprise for any raider… and the apparent weakness of the train’s defences would certainly encourage a sally. The promise of prey coming to them kept the young predator-ships compliant with their new (albeit temporary) monarch’s orders. Seeing what ‘the Spearsong’ could do also kept their minds focused. None of them had witnessed her nightmarish battle to save Zenobia, and they’d been agog as they’d watched her destruction of Tower of Obsidian.

Allyria was standing on Nemesis’s bridge, looking at the spread of debris. The battle for Zyrmosch was still raging; many of the Compact defences had been positioned far enough from the planet that they hadn’t been caught in its immolation, and they were not going down without a fight. The Argosy fleet had taken substantial damage, but they’d broken through the enemy lines in several places, three of the massive battlestations had been crippled or killed, with a fourth about to follow suit. Drones were sweeping minefields to allow the fleet to come closer and use their energy weapons to finish off whatever was left. It would be hours before the outcome was fully determined, but for the moment it looked as if the attackers had won through.

“Are we winning?” the Verrish asked softly. It looked like they were, but the losses each allied fleet had taken were monstrous. Thank the gods, Brightest Night wasn’t among the casualties. When the AI had shown her that the corvette was still intact and largely undamaged, Allyria’s sense of relief had been overwhelming.

“For the moment,” Red replied. “Despite the damage our allies have suffered, the Compact has lost an equivalent amount, though they have reserves to draw upon. Provided that little to nothing else changes in the tactical situation, I would say that our odds of success are very good.”

“And what are the chances of that?” Allyria pressed.

The AI’s avatar smiled ruefully. “Low,” she informed the young officer. “Very low.”

~

Deep within Galhemna’s life zone, the doors to the Tier Seven shipwombs opened. There was less fanfare and ceremony today, but the gravity of the situation was far greater than it had been when Weight of Destiny was launched. There had been no word from and no sign of that Chariot; current speculation was either that it was en route to, or fighting within Natuous. There were other theories, ones that opined a far darker fate. For the sake of morale, these were kept quiet by officers and confessors.

Resolve of Tithrak was the first to emerge, one of the heaviest known dreadnought class in the galaxy, and a twin to Weight of Destiny. Following it was the Sundering Walls of the Mightiest Fortress-class Shield of Civilization, a purpose-built missile platform. They were both newborns and untested – but fully crewed and fully operational. Only the heaviest defences, such as citadels like Tower of Obsidian, outgunned them. Each Chariot was a fleet-killer unto itself, capable of laying waste to entire star systems.

Squadrons of battleships took up formation around the Chariots as they entered open space, hundreds of warships moving towards their distant attackers in perfect unison. Every injury, every insult that the enemy had visited upon the Compact would be repaid tenfold.

Galhemna had been wounded, but it was not defeated. The enemy had cost them heavily, but spent themselves in doing so. No matter what they had left, it wouldn’t be enough. The beast had been stuck, and blood was flowing. It was time to drive the blade home and finish this.

 

[Professor Von Tuck III]

... Whoa. There are many things I could say, but... "that was worth the wait" is probably the most appropriate. I was literally on the edge of my seat for this entire chapter.

In any case, let the ripping and tearing exploding and burning commence in earnest.

 

[kaoswreck]

Red making a real flashy entrance (no pun intended)

 

[Gbghg]

Christ Prox, I was expecting Red to do something showy but that was way beyond what I was expecting. Warp missiles, the Displacement engine in all its horror and glory and using Naid tech to turn a gas giant into a star, Red's really stretching her legs here.

 

[Goat]

The Principality is kinda of regretting things here.

And we get info on what Naiads do to annoying deadtone insects ...

 

[Ginger Maniac]

She’s here.

Click to shrink...

Yes.

She was beautiful. She was an angel, the last one of a murdered world.

Click to shrink...

Yees.

“You will burn.”

Click to shrink...

Yeees.

Its trifurcated prow was opening.

Click to shrink...

YES.

An impossible beam, more akin to a cascading tear in reality than any projection, burst from the center of Nemesis’s open prow.

Click to shrink...

YEES.

Three million kilometers away from Nemesis, Tower of Obsidian died.

Click to shrink...

YEEES.

That was nothing short of magnificent. The whole sequence with the displacement engine, I could visualise perfectly. The jaws opening, the haze surrounding them; beam writhing across space, the breach opening inside the citadel; the grievous structural deformation followed by cascading explosions, and finally the whole station shredding apart as the reactors went up and the breach collapsed.

Chrysalis had come, just as the Broken had promised it would. It had arrived, it had turned the tide of battle…

…and this… this atrocity was its opening act.

Click to shrink...

I haven't enjoyed a work of fiction as much as this in quite a while. Eleven thousand words of distilled phenomenal were well worth the build-up.

Beyond the ongoing verbal fellation, though, Red and Echo may have something of a problem with those Chariots. They're better on a per-titan basis, but the balance of the supporting fleets is well in favour of the Compact. It's going to take some more Naiad ingenuity, a brilliant ploy, or just plain blood and hulls to come out on top of this showdown. I can't help but feel that the whole 'untested new-builds' factor will play some part in what's to come.

 

[kalvasflam]

Interesting. A good ol fashion slugfest, Kemk is aware. Wonder what the last surprise might be.

 

[Aku-dono]

And the real star of the show reveals herself!


(I'm not sorry)

 

[Mashadarof402]

But none of Galhemna's staff know what they're facing in Echo and Nemesis do they?

Interesting times ahead.

 

[Exthalion]

But none of Galhemna's staff know what they're facing in Echo and Nemesis do they?

Interesting times ahead.

Click to shrink...

Principality Chariot is probably the most likely and least disturbing speculation. You know, in so much as an intensity level of "I think my liver just tied itself into a knot and I am now bleeding internally" qualifies for "least" of anything.

 

[Mashadarof402]

Principality Chariot is probably the most likely and least disturbing speculation. You know, in so much as an intensity level of "I think my liver just tied itself into a knot and I am now bleeding internally" qualifies for "least" of anything.

Click to shrink...

A principality chariot with a planet igniter. If nothing else, that would mean all your gas giant industries now orbit giant bombs.

Mmm, I can just picture the aneurysms.

But here's the question. Gas giants don't have enough mass to sustain a fusion reaction.

So even with catalyzers, what happens when some of that already sub par mass burns off? Enough that the fusion reaction eventually collapses?