The War of Terror [FT - Closed]

[The Ctan]

The Weapons Vault was a small chamber in the ship, compared to what one might have expected. Here lay the technology that many cultures would sacrifice much to possess. Within the crypt-vaults of the Arnstoan Rhien, the interior of the vessel was a labyrinth of narrow corridors with architraves that divided them, most of the interior spaces were machine spaces, without atmosphere that made them habitable to organic beings, nor gravitational fields, but this area had been flooded with the breath of life in preparation for their arrival.

The only way to approach the Weapons Vault was down a narrow corridor, other dimensional pathways were funnelled, such that in some ways it did not even exist, and thousands of safeguards and barriers existed. The Triarch Praetorians ignored them all, passing through the archways, their weapons held before them as though they were torches to light the way of the procession. In principle it was a

Rememberancer Torvald Stalin Erummas ita Maynarkh approached with them, while they approached the entrance.

Aldaconcia Elisina Windthorn ita Sekemtar walked beside her, flanked by the guards of the senate, rare living warriors of the Great Civilization, their owl-like helms giving a whimsical expression to their deeply adorned armour, her regal carriage accentuating the formal robes she wore, she wore a headdress of her own people, living flowers, blue, green, pink and purple, vivid in colour and held alive on the stem, the whole affair could be re-planted, while the silver truss underneath that made up the structure beneath it would be cleaned and returned to its box when all was done.

She made the sign of opening with one hand, the ritual gesture that opened most doors, in doing so a barrage of identification checks, ranging from the biometric to the auric and she felt her neuralware aglow in the momentarily sickening barrage of imperative inquiries.

The doors slid aside, molecular spaces altering, to reveal the Hall of Armaments beyond. The space was ceremonial, a wide pillared hall that surrounded several plinths strange devices. The necrons bore an ark to set upon an altar.

A projection, in necrontyr form, appeared, male with silvery hair and eyes, robes of copper that shrouded his form. “Welcome Lady Senator, Keeper,” he said.

“Greetings,” Torvald said, and sketched a formal bow, as did Elisina. The Rememberancer stood aside.

“I come bearing the command of the senate,” she said, “they bid you to prepare a weapon from the forbidden chambers and bid you employ it.”

“I hear the command of the Council of Civilization, what orders do they bestow?”

Elisina bowed her head with studied grace in acknowledgment and gratitude. “We bid you destroy the world of Faunis as the Nemesor Khaneth ita Mephrit and the Strategic Council of the Enydmion Mission bid, once all inhabitants have been borne away to the Habitations of our Great Civilization.”

“It shall be done, I petition the Triarch Council to release to me the arms required.”

It was perhaps ironic that the Great Civilization did not approve of its protectorates having even fission devices, when every one of its cruisers had an armaments bay not unlike this. There were a variety of ferocious devices present, from cyclonic warheads to displacement engines which used an open-throated black hole to link a region in space to a distant black hole, potentially devouring whole systems, and on some ships even more exotic weapons such as stasis halos.

There were precautions in place that prevented as an article of policy the use of such weapons ever being the decision of any single mind; in law any group of citizens with a minimum size of three, in the absence of a quorate representative body within the fringe of communication, the practical range-time limit of communications (normally the senate, in true crises the three person Triarch Council), could agree to employ the weapon, in practice though, to complete the unlock process required an authorisation counter-code from the senate archives and one held by the shipmind possessing it, along with a third that was held by the triarch council. Such an access restriction was different to most states, who allowed unilateral control of weapons of mass destruction. In principle such a limitation could impact the ability of the Great Civilization to retaliate in a total aggression scenario.

By design it was possible to calculate these for the shipmind itself, but doing so would take years even routing all available capabilities to the task. Of course, all of them could synthesise these weapons with time, and some took less time to make new than to break out of the armament vault. Physically dismantling the vault would engage failsafes and so there was little incentive to attempt to break into the vault. Lawfully the shipmind would require the assent of at least two of its embarked passengers or two other citizens from elsewhere before completing such a task; of course because of the lawful nature of shipminds it was behaviourally more likely that it would in the unlikely event it was the only survivor, find and mentor two more citizens in the time taken to circumvent the failsafe than to attempt to operate it alone.

The precautions were required for the responsible use of weapons.

The formalities of having delegates visit in person and formally relay their authorizations by data arks were not necessarily required, but were one of many public displays of formality and ritual that helped cement the ideas of law and duty.

“In the name of the Triarch Council,” Judicator Sauphar, the leader of the Praetorians, said as he lifted his Rod of Covenant over the Data Ark, slotting it into place like a talisman in a port alongside it, unlocking its contents with data-shunts from his own mind, allowing it to integrate with the systems in the weapons chamber, “I assent.”

“In the name of the Senate,” Senator Windthorn said, pressing her own staff into place alongside it and feeling her neuralware hum again, “I assent.”

The calculations made by the systems within the weapons vault were, even with the correct authority imprints and ciphers, slow. They took seconds, whole seconds, these systems could be readied for use in tactical situations, unlocked generally and the weapons vault made available for use as simply a magazine of ammunition, but that was not the instruction they had input. A single weapon was made available.

The adjoining chambers, meters of living metal reinforced with phase-fields and amaranth, adamantium and ceramite, neutron-weave and other structures, some of the hardest parts of the ship to destroy, were impervious to phase systems, teleporters, magecraft and more. A honeycomb of external lines marked the walls hexagonally, and one of them altered colour. Even with this alteration, only the phase shield was altered; in a general release scenario, where the Arnstoan Rhien was simply let off the leash and told to wreak havoc, the systems would instead be attuned to allow the ship’s internal teleporters to reach any of the weapons, but normally this was not possible.

Phase-gravitics drew one of the weapons from its housing, hovering across the air, and Torvald watched. His role here was to record, and his impressions, from the overall emotions, to his sight of the situation would be made available as a record; it would allow others to stand where he was in posterity, to learn, or even for their own ghoulish enjoyment. But Torvald’s own emotions recorded quiet respect, trepidation, and a little awe.

The devices held aboard ranged in size, pebble sized condensed antimatter warheads that could shatter moons, to displacement engines the size of humanoid torsos, dessicators, urns of black nanofluid and even data-units that could change the ship’s weapons in ways not seen since the War in Heaven. Phials of viral compounds for a hundred species, some tailored, others general Some had never been employed in anger, such as the Aristophage, to target the ruling sect of one particular culture or the weapons of Ullgo’thalun, others had many living victims, altered forms of Quickbronze and Kharax and other recent atrocities were available – for the Great Civilization did not care if its weapons were original or not - while others had not been heard of in the lives of most of the galaxy’s cultures. The walls were lined with apocalypses waiting to happen.

The item chosen was not the least dangerous item, not by any means, though it was not the most terrible of those available. A cylinder of metal with sine-script warnings on its surface. Within, its payload was several nanometers wide, and its mass a fraction of a kilogram, even despite its superlative density, it only needed to exist in small quantity.

The Medusen Limit for Strangelets required a certain limit before a negatively charged strangelet could be formed. Except in the unusual conditions of collisions of certain neutron stars, this mass limited prevented natural agglomerations of negatively quark charged strangelets forming. Much as with the critical mass of fission weapons, this was a minimum mass before the substance could be weaponized.

On a human scale such a critical mass was insignificant, sub-microscopic, literally. Its attendant structures were visible, energy-dense holding systems and an exile shunt that could displace it and distribute it across a volume of half a dozen light years, causing it to break down harmlessly, should the unit’s internal power fail. Only by first disengaging this redundant safety system and then phasing the device into ordinary spacetime could it be operated, and extracting the core from the non-baryonic matter sheath it was held in. Though it was dense, it was still easily handleable, and the weapon itself, including its housing, was smaller than the carbonated drinks can so common across the worlds.

Senator Windthorn held out her hand and caught it, feeling the weight of the payload and the housing unit. She looked to Torvald, and considered for a moment if she wanted to say something, then realized she had waited long enough that she simply had to say something. “I hope we only need to use one,” she said. She held it out, to the spacious gravitic cradle that sat at the centre of the room, releasing it. It floated away, and took a stationary position in inertial fields in the centre of the weapons chamber. The vault itself secured itself once more, and the shipmind’s avatar looked at the device. Some of the devices required arming by the myriad of machineries in the ceiling, but this one did not, its payload was fail-active. The final commands to disable its protective systems would simply need to be given, and its payload would do the rest.

“The Sepulchre above will provide the best view,” he said.

Torvald watched the senator as she took her staff from its place. She used the other hand, he noticed, and she wiped her free hand, the one that had touched the weapon, against her thigh.

__ __ __

The Great Civilization’s war against the Empire had occupied much of its time recently. It was an intervention; because of course it was. There was little threat to them there, but the people the Empire was oppressing (hardest) were particularly useful to the Great Civilization, and unlike others it could not be said to be wholly charitable, for the leaders in exile of the Elphegort, the victims of this aggression, had agreed to become a protectorate, which certainly provided an additional motivation. Like a cudbear defending its cubs, the C’tani did not take well to the deaths of their subjects.

The course of the war thus far had been subtle, as wars went. It had been a series of intrusion raids to liberate imprisoned populations and disable the ability of the Empire to organize its oppression regimes, focusing on killing sites and more.

They had started with disappearances; they had no reason to make it obvious, for the psycho-historical analyses suggested that threats and diplomacy of softer kinds would not end the killings as quickly as direct force, and for the most part, killing was not acknowledged by the government.

If a forced labour site was turned into a smoking crater, it was rarely reported as an attack.

There were times they were less kind; the C’tani, had many sects and tribal affiliations, and there had been several approaches, reflecting the ideologies involved. Usually, the Great Civilization’s intercessions involved their gentler militant clades.

But there was a key difference here. The softer clades, whose approaches were more idealized and altruistic, had many chances to earn the glory of intercessions, and counted coup on many enemies. The Thurasid clade particularly, having been closest to the heart of the galaxy and most involved in its affairs.

The Dynastic Houses had their own ways of war, some were fabled for their kindness, the Thurasids among them, others, their heroism, such as the god-slayers of the Suhbekhar, and the valiant defenders and castellans of the Atun, the wise stewards of Oruscar and the chaos-hunting Nihilakh. Like any stereotype these were not true reflections of reality, but they were not untrue either, and of those other houses whose reputations were darker, less was said, but the remained much as they ever had been, insular, aggressive and conservative in their morals and outlook.

The Unitarian Empire was not attacking unaligned peoples, but a people whose leaders had sworn to be vassals of the Great Civilization. That made a significant difference, in the internal politics of the Great Civilization. Though some necrons scorned all mortal enemies as beneath their notice, many others wanted to display their militant zeal, and this was a rare occasion when the more insular necrons wanted to intervene, and it was all that the conciliation service and the Triarch Praetorians could do to keep them from retaliatory genocide while easing tensions by letting them take the lead.

Of course, these blood-soaked campaigners would likely have turned open war into a ruthless campaign where all were put to the sword if given free reign, but to them, a campaign of terror was the next best thing and that at least they were allowed to wage.

More than one death-factory had been found with the guards flayed skins draped on fences, or raised into mechanical undeath, a parody of life, to turn on their former countrymen. Where the necrontyr had walked, their methodologies harkened back to the harvests of old, and they used arcane technology to purge all record of their passing. Other sites, the majority, were attacked, and left intact, attackers emerging and leaving the guards and commanders in the thrall of mind shackle scarabs, obscene machines that nested in the cerebral cavity and kept the victim imprisoned in their own body, these were the preferred strategy where possible, allowing massacre efforts to continue, while serving as evacuation hubs, and gathering intelligence at the same time.

Still, it was not enough, for the Elphe were killed for an industrial purpose and one that was noticeable; they produced a material called numina in their deaths, and while it could be synthesised by other means, there was a notable difference. More than one inspector had been shot in the face by a camp commander, and his follow-up arrived to find a deserted execution site; ready to be re-used (and re-infested).

Still, it was impossible for the enemy not to know they were at war with someone; other attacks were made, thousands of them, to obfuscate the reasons for the intercession. Industrial sites were sabotaged or raided or simply left abandoned, and more than a few grisly murders showed up in urban hubs.

There was another goal to their subversions, one that made a web of implication and intrigue, a network of motives that had been divined by one who had once been known as the Deceiver, and whose influence was strong. The Unitarian Stellar Empire had a policy of punishing families of those it suspected (convicted in their terms) of crimes, and a large portion of the attacks, those that were not intended simply to obfuscate their true intentions, were intended to ensure that senior authorities, ranging from the Imperial Court to provincial officials, would lash out reflexively at those who were most likely to be loyal, or who would be embittered; when kin-bonds determined influence, and kin-bonds likewise were used to punish, they made a social web that could rapidly disaffect many influential people.

These things were accomplished by the ways of the Novokh, Maynarkh and the Drazakh and the others who had engaged in this war. The slow terror of the unknown.

Today, it was the turn of the Mephrit, the Suhbekhar might be noble God-Slayers, and the Nihilakh hunters of the Primordial Annihilator’s corrupted minions, but the Mephrit had a soubriquet too. Every child of the Great Civilization, or at least those who liked to play at the games of the War in Heaven and memorize facts about tanks and death machines, could say what the Mephrit were famous for. They were the Star-Breakers.

Another tribal clade of the necrontyr, turned into an inclusive institution but one that still maintained its traditions. Mass destruction. With as much as could be achieved by the application of the nameless fear alone, for in rescuing many intended victims of genocide one did not end it, but simply encouraged it to become a simmering low level of oppression, and while for some that might be enough, the goal was more than to just make organized, industrial killing difficult, it was to liberate the home systems of the Elphegort, and to bring the Unintarians to heel likewise, and that was something that meant the stratagem had to advance.

And like most of the fabled war-plans of the Mephrit, it began with a star system dying.

__ __ __

It was not the only thing to happen, and Auraneth, who used no dynastic surname, was far from his fellows. There were other necrons that were rarely seen, and he was one such, his kind lurked in pocket dimensions; in his case, dispatched to the court of the Governor of Endymion, Aneile Anstroven. He had been identified as an architect of the genocide, and the Great Civilization had a gift for him.

Auraneth was a Necron assassin, her sleek form moved through dimensions, tethered to the conventional world only remotely, she had been sent with the sleek form of a probe the size of a pebble, a small enough meteorite that it could pass past hundreds of star ships on guard, her form was larger, but it was enclosed within a tesseract built within the insertion unit.

Only once she had stalked forth, a lean thing that moved without visible impression, a shadow, a wraith, a charm-wrapped monster, a thing that hurt to look upon and was forgettable the moment it passed, enchanted by the folk of far D’halbrisir and Vinyandor, she was as far beyond the necrons that had awoken from the Great Sleep as any of her kindred.

But she still carried the same weapon, as she passed through walls and walked in the between-spaces. A synaptic disintegrator. Wound around it, in Seroi Tradition, were black ribbons, that bore prayers of formal exculpation, and a listing of the crimes of her target. It was rare to see her order in these days, but the leaders of the Great Civilization wanted a message sent.

The Synaptic Disintegrator was a sophisticated weapon - indeed the necrons eschewed the simple most of the time - a weapon that projected high energy particles into the neural tissues of the target to achieve selective destruction of neural tissue. It could kill, instantly and painlessly, but could do something crueller.

Auraneth had been bidden not toward efficiency, not this time, at least not to her target. She had instead been instructed to employ it more cruelly, to leave her target aware; but crippled, incontinent and unable to communicate and in spasmodic, recurrent pain that rivalled the most severe terminal diseases. The damage would be so severe that any practical means of healing it would require years of work, and that, the necrons did not believe the Unitarians were capable of.

She brought the weapon up fully phasing into real space for the instant required to fire. Even in the moment and she fired, she knew she would succeed. None of her order had ever missed such a shot.

Governor Anstroven might not understand the message. But others would.

Five other targets involved in the exploitation of conquered peoples were crippled in the same way, at the same second.

[The Unitarian Space Empire]

The following post was co-written with the Great Civilization of The Ctan

A few months earlier

The Endymion system’s star was a bright point far ahead, and the ship could easily be seen as a comet, cold and dark and eminently dead, like its name. The Dead Air decelerated from hyperspeed into an inert tumble, flipping end over end and moving without any change in its motion as though it was completely inert and destroyed. Its engines were baffled, directional, tachyonic emitters; the C’tani did not exclusively use gravitational drives for their systems, though all their ships had gravitational capacity.

It was present only as a scout, and its sensors drank in information from across the solar system with its twin stars as it shed micro-drones, sub-craft and long nets of hydrogen-melded sensors. The function of the vessel was easily served, and there were few things in the universe that could detect a C’tani scout craft.

However, there were more than scout vessels to hand.

Deep in the Dead Air’s insides, dozens of metallic beings were shunted through higher dimensional space, displaced to the distant planetary surfaces in groups five strong, their destinations were isolated areas, where the first analysis suggested that enemy ground forces were not common, and they were accompanied by a number of large, aggressive looking scarab bugs with triangular carapaces.

The C’tani leaders had not finished negotiating with the Selenari, but the military, which Asirnoth had departed to join, was already beginning its task.

The first and easiest planet to access was one that appeared to have an appreciable atmosphere which was thin, but breathable without assistance and it didn’t appear to be toxic to anyone in the party, nor did it have any sign of large scale damage. The area was moist, but not as moist as earth’s hydrophere due to the thinning atmosphere over time, ever lost into space. As the necrons seemed to appear in one of the smaller towns at the edge of the metropolis, they could see signs of recent instituion of martial law. Men in uniforms along with various non-sapient robots seemed to be ordering citizens to return to their homes for the announcement by ‘The Emperor’, and there were many elphe who had reluctantly entered their homes to avoid the strange squads of men that seemed to be policing them from the moment they emerged from their dwellings.

Out in the public areas there were many signs which seemed to have various innocuous messages that had a strange undertone to them “Reject Diversity, we are all living creatures.” on the street corner. “All people are one, so mistreat none.” was along on a billboard. “Deviant thoughts are for traitors.” along various buildings as the necrons passed from the suburbs into the greater metropolitan area. “Cosmopolitan Societies aren’t the best society, but they’re better than Division.” was on a passing gravity propelled bus, as it carried numerous passengers which all appeared in low spirits or terrified as the necrons passed.

“Step lively! All aboard and we move to the next stop, come along now!” One of the strange humans said with a wave of his hand. “Don’t be late! Timeliness is a universal value!” of course unstated was that cultures had different perceptions of timely, but the Empire ruled by its own standards. There were signs that the local guards were being watched by their counterparts, the Imperial Guard, which seemed to keep an almost obsessive eye upon every movement. The other strange thing that was noticeable was that men and women and children seemed to share the same kind of dress code. There were no exceptions for any of them, all businessmen seemed to wear dark three piece suits and ties, women wore long draping skirts and even jewelery appeared to be controlled and limited to earrings and a necklace. The rest was left muted with not even the slightest garish outfit.

One of the officers crossed his arms as he responded into his radio, and nodded his head, “A deviant this early in the morning? Geez these people are implacable.” He muttered as the necrons could hear various obscenities being shouted down the street. The person who yelled out the obscenities was beaten, his wings abused and bent in an odd direction that was clearly painful. “Let me handle this one this time. I’ll take care of it if someone can take my shift.”

“ Aye, do what you need to do Heman, I’ve got you covered.” One of the other officers said, his arm drenched in a clear pus-like blood that had a slight tinge of pink to it.

The necron scouts were equipped with strange technology that seemed frankly magical, euclidean disruption shrouds, a kind of technology that was not just optical camouflage but put them slightly out of alignment with reality; they were shadows in the corner of the eye, and about as easy to actually hit as a shadow; there were few straight lines that could actually hit the necrons; staring at them too long could induce nausea and headaches, and was generally painful, this made it easy enough for them to move about unnoticed, and they moved close to the beating, observing for a time.

“For your deviance, you shall be sent to the Ammin camp for re education. We can take you there, or you can be taken there by the Guardsmen. Make your choice, because neither of us will have mercy on any form of insubordination, and your deviance is mild enough and easy to correct. Instruction for a few months should do it.”

“A few MONTHS?! I’ve committed no crime at all! I had a coworker spill red wine on my jacket, so I am not wearing it and will change when I get home. It was a simple accident, and I didn’t do it on purpose. Can there be any room for simple accidents or mistakes?” The Elphe man asked.

“Mistakes… we do not allow mistakes to continue, so thank the Emperor for his mercy and make your choice.” The Imperial Guards said as the Elphe man was pulled up from the ground by his collar and he groaned.

“I will go with the Guards of Roran, please let me go with them.”

“Very well, we’ve got our eye on you, deviant.” The Imperial guards said as they returned to their patrol. They seemed to be sweeping the streets and were stalking ordinary people as they passed by, and directed their pace, shouting for some of them to speed up and others to slow. For them to quiet their step, or for them to not drag their feet as they walked along. Others directed their flight which appeared to be limited to various areas that were marked off.

In all likelihood this would be the only arrest those guards would make tonight, therefore the necrons were confident that the best way to go about their mission here would be to pick up the Elphe man on his way to the camp; there might be collective punishment if he vanished, however, so there would need to be an eye kept out on the area after; depositing sensor-dust, they moved on, following the unfortunate.

To that end, they waited as well, watching to see what notes were taken, how efficiently everything was scanned - removing people from a system was much easier if the keepers of that system were complacent about recording; if not, they would do their best to intercept the updated records and prevent any record of the man’s incarceration.

[The Ctan]

The Engagement off Retonil was swift. Typical of the engagements beginning the second phase of the Unitarian-Civilization conflict. The Unitarians had long existed within the Centaurus Supercluster, a location that was so far from human core territories, let alone Necrontyr ones, that it was suggestive that they had been part of the Panhumanic Dispersion.

Humans were found in many places, from the Skyriver Galaxy, to the ancestors of the Alteran people, across the universe, that they had no practical right to be, that the Great Civilization believed there had been numerous accidental dispersals through the use of unsafe interstellar drives, particularly Empyrean based travel throughout the ages.

The Empire was old, and its culture believed to hail from the ancient Mysidian-Palomecian civilization thanks to lexical roots and ethnic makeup, but further from that there was little known of how they had come to be present.

The engagement began with the deployment of a device or weapon that was imperceptible to humans, a weaponized offshoot of the inertialess drive technology, its activation was akin to a bomb that permeated local spacetime briefly with an observer effect that decoupled quantum entanglement communications. This was an effect that had been used rarely within the Sol System or other key sites due to the number of outside observers that could be affected, and the spatial damage that this caused when used repeatedly. Here, however, there was no issue with this technology, and it destroyed the effectiveness of ansible-based communications.

The attackers’ own communications were briefly disrupted, but these could be restored using hyperwave communications, something the target vessels lacked.


The primary target was the Fortress Ship Carisoma, one of the largest starships in the navy of the United Stellar Empire. By the standards of local space it was huge a mobile fortress with a keel of over three kilometers and more than five thousand crew and four times as many passengers, it was equipped with an arsenal of weapons. It was likely that most aboard thought it was impregnable, and indeed it could have inflicted significant damage, its escorts more so, on its attacker. Its weapons had several esoteric effects, the most significant of which was a quantum cannon, a beam weapon that generated a fission reaction in the target, causing mundane hull materials to explode violently.

If they had been aware that it was under attack.

The necrons were not known for their stealth, but in turth that was more due to the policies they pursued than any inability. Likewise, stealth was not generally possible in space, which made it all the more useful as an asset. The Carisoma however, did not detect the target vessel, which was built for the task, and transferred its emissions to an esoteric alternate dimension and a narrow beam of neutrinos, and moved through space cold in its approach. Subtler even than the scythe class light cruisers that served as the Great Civilization’s military scout-vessels, this was a narrow vessel a fraction the Carisoma’s size and firepower.

The beach-head unit that was transported within the Fortress Ship was scarcely more than a few meters long; the ship itself had more than a billion cubic meters of space within its frame, in towers that rose on its dorsal and plunged on its ventral side, in large engines at its rear; highly automated, its intruder defense, like any vessel, was reliant on internal sensors.

The first wave of intruders used the same technology as the needle-ship that had brought them to remain undetected in the spaces between decks. Its jewel-like eyes gleamed, and it reached out with forelimbs of molecule sifting material from the structure before it. Nothing on a ship was waste material, even one such as this, but the Carisoma would not miss certain parts of its mass.

The needle ship slipped away.


The intruder was mother to a first generation of scarabs, small constructs that could reproduce themselves, and each of those produced more of their own kind, moving out of sight of the crew, converting inertial suppression systems, cargo, wiring for weapons systems, parts of defensive systems, moving through the ship and making more of themselves. The crew would recognize the damage first from the reduction of power usage, more than anything, but by the time that this was done, the Carisoma’s defensive systems were already fatally compromised.

By the time the crew took to bug hunting in a literal sense, rather than being concerned about the same systems failure that had mismanaged their communications having spread to other systems, they were far too late to be combat effective.

More importantly, the parasite craft of the Carisoma had carried the self-replicating plague with them, infected through air and reaction mass umbilicals, data-lines and other systems that connected the ship to its plethora of support craft where docked, ensuring that through lighters and shuttles they were able to infect the majority of the escort fleet in short order.

Only then did the mother-scarab open the portal generator that had come with it, and the short battle to retain control of the Carisoma begin and ended within half an hour; a classic example of refusing to fight with honour, and another disruption without obvious culprit.

[The Ctan]

Elsina watched from the observation gallery of the Ashtennt as they closed in on the target vessel. The ships ahead of them were moving like panicked deer as they headed out of range of the leviathan of the Great Civilization Harvest Ship. The ship had dropped out of hyperspeed seconds ago and the ships it was attacking had spread out in all directions. They represented a convoy approach to moving goods between the stars. The Empire’s ships were more numerous than the Great Civilization’s vessel but their travel time was slower.

This war was not well known within the Great Wheel, the Milky Way galaxy, they were far from it, in the depths of the Hydra Cluster. Humanoid civilization was more diffuse here, and with few competitors, there had never been a drive for the Empire to build single larger ships.

She was watching from the observation deck of the Harvest Ship, a portion of the vessel’s power was being used to decelerate the events outside so that she and other spectators could see. She wore skin-tight cling-armour under the banded living metal outwear worn by the Order of Peace, worn with a fringe of lilac hippogriff feathers worn under her pauldrons. The armour was augmented with the regal purple runecloth of her people. No one went onto a warship in battle without a degree of personal protection, even a senator.

“Which one?” she asked the shipmind.

In reply the forward armourglass screen lit with iconographic text highlighting several vessels, the ship had already dispatched its drone-cloud to several. The Great Civilization’s infamous harvest fleets were typically surrounded by clouds of thousands or millions of canoptek constructs of various sizes, chiefly the numberless scarabs, that served as tools for close-in work.

“I have cut their ansible links,” the Ashtennt said, the ability to break down quantum encryption was one of the more poorly understood abilities of C’tani ships, a function of their quantum shields, and the reason that the Ashtennt had chosen to intercept the fleet now. Quantum shielding worked by collapsing waveforms into a favourable resolution, actualizing a potential reality where the ship was unharmed, where weapons directed at it malfunctioned or missed, though Elsina was sure that the Void Dragon would tell her that her understanding of such things was wrong, the effects were simple enough. When used offensively the same technology could desynchronize entangled pairs across a large volume of space, “I am scanning for Elphe life signs now.”

Elsina had listened to an explanation of how that ability worked at one point, but she had no idea, the combat-timer displayed the sidereal time outside the ship crawling along in the milliseconds.

“Located,” the Ashtennt announced, “this ship, here,” the indicated a vessel with a sizeable keel, a bulk transport that was gleamingly new and well fortified, “They’ve stopped being so coy I see,” the shipmind said, “engaging,” the ship was waiting on no permission from its observer to put its operation into action, and a beam of searing green fired, an ablation projector vapourising a narrow line across the target vessel, cutting a slice through its drive section as easily as Elsina would carve open a cake.

The ship did not stop, moving through the target ship with the ease of a surgeon while its other weapon systems flashed several times, living lightning meeting and collapsing the shields of the convoy’s escorts, turning them into tumbling splinters of glassy molten metal in the void. The other civilian ships within the convoy were panicking, and the Ashtennt would get to impounding them in due course but this one, this one had something to hide.

The target ship was in six, then seven irregular pieces. The Ashtennt’s ablation whip was precise enough to work without cutting through anything that would explode, its first slices had opened up remass tanks to space and cut the drive column out of the vessel, while its second shot had taken out the antimatter reactor like an apple core and caught it in the flux of the ablation field.

The ablation weapons of the Great Civilization, confusingly nicknamed Gauss Flayers by the Old Imperium, who had forgotten the use of the physicist’s name (to the Imperium, of course, a Techno-Saint) as another term for coilguns, worked on a weaponized teleportation principle; antimatter could be winnowed away safely enough.

The ship’s segments were tumbling in free-fall when the Ashtennt pulled the most valuable in, leaving several of them to roll in the void leaking atmosphere from punctured compartments.

“Are you sure this is safe?”

“Of course,” Ashtennt said, “if anything goes wrong we will carry out a snap-retrieval, we are testing the new system against displacer-resistant targets, but I have a positive lock on everyone in the target area. This approach has been reliable in simulation and live-joint exercise, I am quite confident.”

The ship-fragment they were boarding was surrounded by a trio of octopoid machines that moved with the animation of mechanical life. She watched as they probed into the crippled ship segment, clinging onto it. Occasionally a nearby weapons platform would spear the segment with a jade beam of ablation, this she knew was the response to guards who resisted, and weapons lanced through the separated module of the ship to strike, eventually, the last sealed compartments were breached, and an air-globe formed around the area, projected by modules detached from the octopoid assault units.

The mechadendrites of the assault units eventually emerged with englobed passengers in life-support bubbles with soap-bubbles of radiation-proof shielding projected around them.

“Of course, at this point,” Ashtennt said, as it snap-displaced the people rescued from the genocide transport to its infirmary, “in a Constellation model, we would be looking at involving a separate module displacing over a longer range than I am…”

[The Ctan]

Ourisa Madrasti looked at the starstele. The structure had appeared overnight on Everanol. It was huge, at least thirty feet high, and clearly technological, parts of its interior structure could be seen through it although that was not the thing that had drawn the most attention to it. On its face was a string of text boldly proclaiming its origin.

Two ribbons of text, one she couldn’t read, and the one she could read ran parallel along its surface on either side.

Erected in the Second Era of the Great Civilization in the Six Hundredth and Sixty-Third Year of Naogeddon by the Command of Devangi Pancholi ita Dyvanakh, Proaldaconciga of the Great Civilization, Phaerakh of the Stars by the Mandate of the Senate.

The great Proaldaconciga has ordered that all throughout the realms of the Thirty Second Cyclion Tempest Galaxy the rule of the Great Civilization shall be extended. The Great Civilization guarantees Life, Prosperity and Health to all its subjects.

While in the past for many millennia, access to healthcare has been limited by artificial scarcity, henceforth this will be provided to all in strict response to medical need.

While in the past, people have been regulated in their behaviour to even the smallest degree, this practice will now end, and laws shall be made that protect life, prosperity and health, but do not dictate how to live; what is good is known by us, and we uphold the righteous with our laws, but do not demand compliance under penalty of force.

The righteous treat all with respect and with equality under the law, no person shall be held as inferior in status before our laws save for their own actions, and all persons are born equal and free.

We shall to each person give the means to thrive without toil and to educate themselves as they please; this is prosperity which we have discovered for ourselves and give freely to all who obey our laws. To those who desire wealth, the path of wealth will be opened, and to those who desire equality, the path of equality will be opened.

All who are wrongly imprisoned will now go through, we shall only punish those who can be proven to have done a wrong proportionate to their punishment.

It had appeared overnight, outside her home, in the central garden of the microdistrict, visible from her window and those of everyone else fortunate enough to have a garden facing, the most visible sign of the change. She hadn’t been the first to approach the thing, but she did, reaching out to touch its surface. The overhead lights of the district-park shone on the alabaster and she traced the golden lines of text on it.

Ourisa had never truly seen anything quite like it, and the Erveranol planetary network had lit up with chatter reporting more of these structures, perhaps in every district.

She had a feeling that the whole thing was being watched, and wondered briefly what it might mean. Of course, the Empire was always watching, but this wasn’t the only thing that was saying the Empire had been deposed.

Her husband had been speaking to the hologram in the house for the last hour and some, and Ourisa always made it a point to go out for a morning walk, not that the garden area really counted as ‘out’ in that it was still part of the megopolis, but it would do.

The hologram was a strange thing, human-seeming in appearance, which had introduced itself as soon as they had taken the call, claiming to be the world-mind. The world hadn’t had a mind yesterday, now apparently it did, and a new moon, too, not that she had seen the moon.

Ourisa frowned slightly, “Hey,” she said, reaching for her communications terminal. “What do viewing gallery tickets cost now?”

Smoothly, and with a slightly different voice, though she was not sure, it answered. “The service is currently without charge, there is a queue as maximum occupancy has been reached,” it said.

She sighed, some things didn’t change. “You can visit several formerly enclosed parklands if you wish,” the terminal suggested.

Or maybe not.

[The Ctan]

Ourisa had never chosen to marry Farlon, which had been a choice by the Celestial Bureau of Harmonious Union, based on the astrological significance of their lives in the lunar calendars of the Empire.

This was the way that most marriages were conducted, and the requirement for all to be paired in the near-indissoluble union had been inculcated into the culture of the Empire from when it had settled into its current form.

Ourisa knew the Empire claimed to be tens of thousands of years old, certainly, it was older than living memory, even of the few elves she had met. Some on Everanol, a world of dissidents, or those who had been standing too close to dissidents when the hammer came down, disputed that age, and said the Empire itself was only several millennia in age. Before that they said, other polities had ruled.

She’d never quite got the principle, though she had learned to tolerate and even like Farlon. The requirement the Empire had for more citizens was a strange one; she had never actually had any sort of employment, there were no jobs for those without connections.

Taithus had. He had until recently dwelt in their arco and had once been a well-known historian and academic, pretty much everyone had heard his ideas in the local community; he did not have anyone else to teach anymore.

The Empire’s attachment to the idea that the population should grow was ancient, rooted in events half-remembered in the Myth of Exile when half the birth world of Manhome had been scourged and survivors had been few.

Taithus said that this had been a trauma that had become a tradition, and then a superstition, that in the early days of the exile, a hundred thousand years before, population control had been a neccessity.

The Empire spent considerable resources on terraforming, and on space habitats, there were countless ships and vessels but most were pleasant worlds.

But then, the Empire had its caste system and its economic preferences. The vast majority of people had failed to achieve in the phenomenally difficult Examination to even achieve the lowest of the dozens of vertical ranks of civil nobility. Far less than one in ten thousand passed such a trial, particularly given that from the third rank prestige by ancestor was guaranteed, occupying the majority of the upper ranks.

Despite all this, she had few complaints about her life, certainly, it was better than Taithus’, she had merely been deported here. Taithus had been imprisoned, disfigured and deported to the barely habitable world. Not for his views, which were forbidden, but which they hadn’t gotten around to - despite the total monitoring there was great uncertainty about when they would come for you - but for protecting his daughter from a marriage she objected to.

In the past seven days, she’d been able to go to much more of the planet than she had since she’d arrived - a mandatory resettlement for her whole family due to low harmony score, for reasons she’d never appreciated.

And the world was in a panic, as much as the C’tani were seen as having liberated the world, they were also forthcoming with information, and that had meant that there had been riots, struggles to get offworld.

A brief week of freedom had been ended with a curfew as serious as any the Empire had ever imposed; there had been no arrests though, and no punishment, the panic had been entirely understandable.

The Empire had ordered Everanol destroyed.

Urma was one of the few who wasn’t on the surface of the planet. She had been swift to take the hand of the new overlords of Everanol; it was part of her profession and one that was now legal.

The Great Civilization ship Convergence of Values was a larger vessel than she was used to, and she had always travelled in sleep pod or steerage before; the Empire had a lot of people, and it had a lot of ships too, but that did not mean that it had comfortable conditions on them.

A freight hold could be filled with people as easily as cargo, and with only small concessions to air scrubbing and food supply it could become an easy way to transport people; accidents happened, of course, but the Empire was not traditionally interested.

At first, Urma had thought that she was in the first-rate quarters of the ship, and that there were others below, it had taken answers not only from her employer, Talathyst ita Sautekh, but from half a dozen others including the AI of the ship itself, for her to accept that there were only a few hundred people on board.

There were other contrasts too, the riot of clothing even in the small crew on board was remarkable to Urma’s eyes; she had seen striking clothing before, and on Everanol the local government had rarely cared to be strict about deviance.

These C’tani though, were a society of deviants.

Talathyst was one of a group called Lawgivers, a form of law enforcement, not like the Imperial Guard, as far as she could tell, nor local police. Talathyst had gone into a discussion of how the Great Civilization’s law enforcement functioned, but Urma’s eyes had begun to cross during the conversation.

Now though, she was paying perfect attention.

“Are you sure we’ll survive?” she asked.

“Yes,” Talathyst said, “this ship is an Integration Facilitation Vessel, so it’s built to warship standards, it would take prolonged fire from an enemy squadron to harm us.”

“And how many squadrons do they have?”

Talathyst smiled, “Many, but we should still be fine.”

“Ah,” Urma said, unconvinced.

“You’re certainly better than you would be on the surface.”

“Couldn’t we just evacuate?”

“Yes,” she said, “or at least we could get some people off, but take a look at this,” the image before them shifted at Talathyst’s internal command, to show the shape of another C’tani vessel.

This one too looked like a musical instrument, the long aft booms of most C’tani vessels made Urma think of stringed instruments. “What am I looking at?” she asked.

“The Simultaneity-class Manufactory Vessel Spacetime Seamstress, she’s been producing a triple-layered planetary shield. See the thing in that central hole?”

“Yes?”

“The thing being assembled there is a shield projection platform, when they’re done they synchronize together.”

She pursed her lips, not wanting to point out how frail they looked.

The curfew had certainly limited Irisa’s business, she had been quite spectacularly annoyed by the few days of traffic she had experienced followed by imposed dead periods; with much of the world in a panic, she was quite excruciatingly bored.

The Empire’s housing policies were designed entirely to meet the well-regulated population, but over the last few years, the settlement of Everanol had exceeded their original plans, resulting in the subdivision of apartments.

It hadn’t escaped her notice that the more people the Empire found undesirable the more they partitioned apartments, and downgraded utilities.

Irisa’s home had become quite run down over the last few years, and she had to cope with the lack of employment. Even the best imperial worlds had few jobs, especially for Yinudrel, but she had done reasonably well for the last few years, she had taught herself to draw, and draw well, but six months ago merely being on Everanol had dropped her Unification Metric to the point where she wasn’t allowed to post her work.

Then six months ago the planetary civilian ansibles had been downgraded to a basic level, ostensibly for maintenance, and she had lost the ability to even respond to off-world inquiries.

Since then she had taken to street art, which was even less comfortable. And now she was stuck indoors. Irisa was deeply, deeply annoyed.

She had no inspiration to start work on any sort of project and while the invaders had removed a whole raft of content restrictions on the net, including a whole raft of art suites she’d wanted to try, but nothing right now was really taking her mood.

Assurances from the C’tani were not worth much, but there wasn’t anything she could really do to get out or get a ship, so she was stuck with only hope. Perhaps the invaders had made it up as a propaganda device, and the Empire was not going to attempt to destroy the planet. Perhaps they were not, and they were actually going to prevent it. Or perhaps she had merely hours to live.

External ‘casts were still available and the occupiers had not done anything to cut them off, though they had restricted outbound communication, in order to make it unclear to the Empire what had happened on Everanol.

The emergency message was almost unexpected; what was the point, after all?

“Attention. Your attention please.” The Great Civilization’s announcement came through in True Speech perfectly clearly, the sign of an AI speaking, she supposed, or the kind of neural cyberware she certainly couldn’t afford. “We are authorized to confirm that Imperial forces are about to arrive within the system. For your own safety do not tamper with external protection systems of arcology environments. The official situation broadcast and discussion is available on request.”

She shrugged, “Switch in, may as well watch,” she sighed.

The drone ship arrived in the system without pyrotechnics, its spatial compressor engine allowing it to fold space to reach its destination. It was surrounded by flotillas of escort vessels that transited at the same time.

They did not jump ‘blind’ of course, they had long-range scanners that could filter through space-time, but their pre-jump sift had missed something significant.

“So, we’re running right?” Urma said.

From her vantage point on the Convergence of Values she could see something of the size of the weapons platform that had arrived in the system.

Waves of information seemed to bleed from a hologram that floated above the central table in the chamber, the strange language of the Great Civilization and for her benefit, True Speech ideograms in orderly ranks.

Talathyst had offered to let Urma return to the planet before the battle, but she had felt safer on the Convergence; the ship-mind had insisted she don a field-suit of clinging fabric and low-level force fields and she felt quite strange in the alien garments.

“We’re not,” it was the Convergence itself who spoke, and she was still unused to ships breaking into conversation unasked.

“I hope you guys are as good as you think you are,” she said. The planetary maintenance drone was a huge spindle built around a string of toroidal components, its official mission was to re-carve the major moon of Everanol. Despite this, it seemed to have targeted the planet.

The presence of a fleet of unrecognized ships seemed to give it no pause, the expectation that simply firing on the planet would end the engagement was logical, and though its picket fleet comprised thousands of ships they remained in a loose formation while the drone’s weapons system prepared to fire.

Irisa knew something about weapons, the drone was equipped with technology to nullify, through a process she had to admit to not understanding, the strong nuclear force of targeted objects. It was overkill for its ostensible purpose.

It was overkill for demolishing a star.

There was no visible beam, she knew, but she still almost wanted to watch. In a second or two she would know nothing. At least it would quick.

There was a thunderclap, even through the arcology’s walls, even from the upper atmosphere, as the weapon struck the force-screens around the planet.

She screamed.

Urma watched in horror as the vast weapon fired, her hands to her mouth. She thought for a moment of everyone she had met and knew on the surface, as the shields flashed and glowed with the brightness of a nova. This continued for not only seconds but a minute, two, until parts of the spindle-like station were glowing red with heat.

The beam ended, and she could see the planet of Everanol again. Her hands lowered, and she held the table. “It’s… not dead?”

“No,” Talathyst said. “But we are about to come under attack, they expected us to move off.

Long arcs of blue-white fire lashed out of the C’tani fleet, intercepting various craft, and she watched.

“Why aren’t more of them being destroyed?”

“Careful shooting,” Talathyst said, as a cloud of C’tani ships closed on the planetary attack drone station. “They’re trying to disable enemy ships.”

“Well…” she said. “Is it working? Are we winning?”

“We are,” Convergence of Values said. “The Empire’s fleets haven’t really fought for millennia, and are more used to rebels, their initial attacks on our ships were aimed at keeping us here, if you can believe it. Some of them are breaking onto escape vectors now, but we are going to be able to run maybe half of them down before they can fold out of here.”

“What about that thing?” Urma asked.

“Oh, the drone is having a rather high-speed conversation with our fleet, it’s thinking about surrender. We’ll see,” the shipmind said, “there’s some nasty self-expression constraints in its mind, but we’re about up to persuading it to let us help there.”