To Walk the Constellations Pt. 15

"I'm still with you, Venn."

"Yeah, you are..." I groaned. "Well. With Wotan. You're not fully connected to me..." I grinned. "Just barely enough to fuck with my eyes. My tongue. My taste. Not enough to hear my thoughts...or else you'd have heard me beg you earlier, right?" I asked, and felt a moment of satisfaction at Wotan's eyes widening slightly. "That's because you're not as fucking cracked up as you think you are...you're one Machine. In the Domain, there were...how many? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?" I arched an eyebrow. "And they all worked together to run the Domain's machinery. How far are you stretched, maintaining every Liminal Knight, every conspiracy, every false prophecy? How much of your run time is dedicated to handling us?"

The Machine snorted. "I don't see why you think this is such a victory, Venn. It doesn't change the fact that your mind is going to be like this your entire life. And if you keep trying to piss me off...I can make it worse."

"Oh, you can make it worse?" I asked. "What, burn out my pleasure and sex centers? Overload my optic nerves? Sterilize me?" I shook my head. "I don't care what you do to me. Don't you get it? You've already lost."

The Machine chuckled. "Lost...I...I'm not your enemy, Venn."

"You're everyone's enemy," I said.

"No. I'm your friend," the Machine said, its voice gentle – a contrast to Wotan's raspy growl. "I've made your history mean something."

I smirked. "And that's...about four hundred and seconds," I said, quietly.

Wotan's eyes widened. "What?"

I grinned. "When a FTL drive activates, it makes a star into a collapsar for a plank's moment, by focusing its gravitational energies inwards. That's the basis of a jump, whether you're using a jackdrive or a spindrive. But if you reverse the equation and suppress a star's gravity, rather than increase it...do you know what happens?"

Wotan's head looked up.

My gut-math felt right.

It took light five hundred seconds to go a single AU.

A single AU was the distance between Home's primary and Home.

Wotan's eyes widened and she lifted an arm. As if to shield herself from a sky catching fire as the cascading wave of our homeworld's star going nova struck the atmosphere.

Through Wotan, it screamed.

Then I screamed.

The pain was deeper and fierce and hotter than anything I had felt in my life. My nerves burned and flared – and the only thing that saved me was that it was so infinitesimally short. I staggered, sagged, then collapsed to the side, gasping heavily. My whole body ached. My head ached. I felt blood dripping from my nose. Wotan was collapsed onto the bean bag. But when my eyes blinked, they saw clearly.

They saw the stars.

And the stars...

The stars had never looked more beautiful in my life.

I grinned and when I breathed, air tasted sweet. So very sweet.

"I fucking knew it," I whispered.

***

The Alliance Fleet's race from Eudaimonia to We Made It would have gone down in the history of the Chain as the most impressive feat of logistic expertise in the history of the human sphere, had it not been for the equally impressive display of calculated brutality on the part of their enemies. While Vorsoth's Fleet lacked the legitimate authority of Regent Drak and his fleet, they had the largest number of worldkillers arrayed into a single fleet since the Battle of Three Singularities. And, as the ancient proverb went, force has a tact all of its own.

Worlds were stripped of vital fuel and water reserves to ice up the hulking worldkillers of Vorsoth's armada. Crew were pushed to their breaking limit, jump after jump, with the singular goal of crossing the zenith of their enemies. Crossing the zenith – the same method that Vorsoth had used to capture the crew of the Tiamat II – involved arriving a day or two ahead of the enemy and setting up into a defensive orbit around the primary. Against a single ship, it was a nearly inescapable trap.

Against a fleet, it would be the worst slaughter that the Chain had seen since the early days of the first civil war.

The Alliance Fleet knew that Vorsoth was pushing to meet them. They calculated Delta-V and jump tolerances, based off the intelligence fed to them by their spies spread along the Chain. The Quantum Forge kept them abreast of the enemy, even now.

But the best intelligence and the best planning cannot do a damn thing against human error.

Doubly so when the human error originated from a calculating intelligence that wished neither a turkey shoot nor a boring and protracted duel. The Machine wanted its star war. And the Machine ensured it would get it.

Thale jerked awake as the acceleration tube receded around him. The pipe that had been feeding him oxygen and nutrients for the jump slurped out of his mouth. He coughed, spluttered, and wheezed, while the rest of the bridge crew of the Victrix Republique started to rouse from their tanks as well. But even as Adoran rolled his shoulders and stepped out of the tube to his right, an alert started to wail from several of the consoles. Still half naked crew stumbled to their platforms, and Thale could see the ruddy orange glow of Kataclyzm's primary slowly wheeling in the bridge window.

"Sir!" a senseor-tech said. "We're getting enemy IFF!"

"No!" Adoran hissed.

Thale thrust out his palm, his eyes closing. He grabbed onto the controls of the Victrix and swept his electric senses outwards. Horror and relief mingled as he started to ping off the heat signatures of other worldkillers. His. Vorsoth's. All of them tumbled, pell mell, from the heart of the systems primary. Some were showing sun-sear damage. Others were frantically burning their thrusters, trying to right themselves. Each screamed for orders, for confirmation, for simple clarification. Thale focused and his words spoke through the ship, on every laser com.

"All ships! Open Fire!"

The first two worldkillers to actually manage to bring their guns online and to bear on the enemy were the Firestromos and the enemy Coventry. The first barrage was far from a success. Hitting a ship in space – even ships as massive and energetic as Hegemonic capital ships – was nearly impossible without significant calculations and precise aiming. It was, in effect, like hitting a bullet with another bullet while both bullets were spinning in opposite directions. In a pitch black room. The targeting computers needed to determine distance, bearing, and velocity all in a short few moments, using nothing but the heat signatures of their enemies and the parallax between them and the stars – which themselves were washed out by the glare of Kataclyzm's primary.

The end result was that Firestromos shot nearly five hundred thousand rounds of high velocity ferrous slugs from their nadir rail guns, angling themselves to slowly bring their port, then prow guns to bear, switching from bank to bank with such smooth, mechanical precision that the brilliant orange flare-lines of the slug's tracers never broke or waver. That line of brilliant, almost liquid, light flowed and whipped through space, seeking out their enemy's belly, while an identical streamer of shots flowed from the Coventry.

Thale's mind reached the Firestromos before either ship corrected their aim. He let the telemetry from the Victrix leap across space and into the Firestromos' targeting arrays. Their railguns corrected their angles and the change of angle rippled along the stream of tracers, looking nearly whiplike. Slugs began to rain on the Coventry. The same agrav engines that could sustain a crew through high velocity burns and through the crushing impact of a sundive were focused outwards now, angled and adjusted to blunt and alter the trajectory of incoming rounds. The end result looked a hell of a lot like a hot frying pan that had just gotten a load of butter tossed onto the skillet, with streamers of tracer-coated rounds zipping off randomly in space at near right angles to the ship.

Similar engagements began across the fleet, and Thale reached out for his ships, while Adoran and Enriquah did the same. Where it was hard for a single ship to do the parallax tracking to target another by itself, two or three working together could accomplish the same task in a fraction of the time. With a Liminal Knight guiding them, using the ancient miracles, the weapons fire of the Alliance Fleet transitioned from inaccurate and wild to deadly and focused. The Firestromos and the Triumpherant both angled on the Coventry, pouring fire onto them from two different vectors. Agrav engines stressed to the limit, the Coventry began to spin, to fire their broadsides at both enemy ships.

And that was when the missiles started to hit space.

At which point, Vorsoth's presence slammed into Thale like a fist of a furious god.

The nearly psychic scream of fury chased Thale of the ethereal space of communicating ships and onto the chaos of his flagship's bridge. Officers bellowed orders and missile launch patterns were announced by impersonal automatons, while the forward window was dominated by the flicker-flash of missiles zipping out of the spinal batteries by the hundreds. Streaks of light sometimes broke through the spread of missiles – distant tracer rounds being fired by ship to ships.

Thale put his finger to his nose and it came away red with blood.

"Sire!" A watch officer ran towards him. "Sire, chaffpults are targeting our ship – we think they may be concealing boarding pods, but we can't be sure."

Thale staggered over to the console that the officer pointed to. The array showed the utter pandemonium of the battle – but it also showed a warbling, flexing cloud of confused sensor indicators between the Victrix and the San Diego. Thale's eyes narrowed and he frowned. "Saturate that entire area with antimatter torpedoes."

"Aye aye!"

"Incoming!"

A wave of railgun slugs began to rain onto the Victrix's fore shields. The whole ship groaned – kinetic transference between the agrav fields and the impacted shields. It was as if he was some ancient sea going ship, hammered and battered by the waves. Thale growled as Quah opened her eyes, falling onto her knees. She shook her head. "T-This is harder when there's-"

The bridge filled with a white light.

When it faded, one of the officers – her voice awed in the silence, whispered: "That was the Tokyo. We're getting nothing from the Valedictus and the Cutarian. They were in the blast range – nearly point blank."

Thale closed his eyes.

The battle had only just begun.

***

Techne had gotten used to the idea she was going to die. It had been dangled over her head so many times over the past few weeks that it had become stale. Then boring. Then utterly aggrivating. Every time the Hegemonic guards made some coarse joke about dismembering her or feeding her to the trash compactor, she had needed to bite her lip to not just scream at them to finish it already. She didn't know why Vorsoth hadn't killed her, or Mal, or Rossck.

When she had put it to a vote, calling through her bars to Mal and Rossck in their cells, Rossck had put forward the idea that they were going to be crucified somewhere nice and public. Where everyone would get to watch them. Mal, ever the optimist, believed that it was be because Vorsoth wanted to use them as leverage over Venn, who was still alive. Maybe even escaped – and now seeking to find a way to free them.

Techne wanted to believe that.

But...

She had an alternative plan to 'Venn rescues us.' She had been quietly checking over her cell, trying to find what was and what wasn't usable as a weapon. She had settled on the leg of her cot – she had worried at her with her fingers until she was pretty sure she could snap it free from the socket and brain someone with it. Now, she simply needed to wait for the right moment. The ship had gone through several jumps – the cells flooding with cheap, shitty acceleration gel every time. And every time, Techne had waited for some emergency, some fire, some technical breakage.

Each time, she had been disappointed.

Until now.

The wailing battle alert alarm got her out of bed. She grabbed onto the bars, grinning fiercely.

"Oh great," Rossck said, quietly. "Now we get to die in cells."

"This is our chance," Techne muttered.

"What?" Rossck asked as the door opened and a shocktrooper who had been assigned to watch prisoners during battle stepped into the corridor. "Some lucky railgun round is going to mist that fucker and his gun is going to drop right at your fucking lap?"

"What did you say, lizard scum?" The shocktrooper snarled.

A pair of sounds so close together that they were nearly identical exploded through the room – CLANGCLANG – and left Techne's ears buzzing with confused after signals. That was followed by the slurping sound of emergency sealant slapping over the holes. As Techne rested her forehead against the bars and blinked the pain out of her head slowly, Rossck spoke, his hands clasped over his ear-holes.

"Well, I'll be a son of a fucking bitch."

The shocktrooper's armor had kept him surprisingly intact for being hit in the back by a railgun slug. It had gone through and through, pausing only to turn his torso and arms into a fine red mist. His legs, the exoskeletons locked in place, remained standing, and his battered rifle had skittered past Rossck and Techne's cell to Mal's. Mal snatched it up with a laugh.

Then.

"Fuck! It's dead."

"What is it, a lasgun?" Rossck asked.

"No," Mal said.

"Stubber? Shotgun? Bilpro Acider? Screamer?"

"No, give me a damn second, you gun nut," Mal snapped back. Then, laughing. "Hah! It's a clavegun!"

"Yes!" Rossck pumped his fist.

"I don't care if it's a fucking threshold blade," Techne shouted across the way. "If it's dead, we can't use it."

"To the contrary, Cap," Rossck said, thrusting his arm out. "Mal! Underhand that."

Mal tossed the gun, awkwardly arcing it out by shoving a burly arm through the space in the bars. The rifle flipped and tumbled and ended up slap bang in the middle of the corridor, far out of Rossck or Techne's reach.

"Jesus Christ, Mal!" Rossck snapped.

"You try and toss a rifle one handed with these bars in the way!" Mal snapped back.

Techne, though, was already stepping backwards. She slammed her foot into the weakened socket between the cot and the leg. The leg came free with a squeal and rasp of metal. She snatched it up, then slid it along the floor to Rossck's cell, clattering and clinking every step of the way. Rossck grabbed it, then held out his arm. He batted at the gun once. Twice. Then finally, snagged it and dragged it back. "Aha!" He laughed. "Okay, now for the stupidly dangerous part."

Techne bit her lip, watching as Rossck tugged out the magazine and pulled out one of the fist sized mass-reactive shells claveguns used. He fiddled with the base of the shell with one of his claws, then placed it precariously on the out-thrust box of the lock mechanism. Then he hurried backwards as the clavebolt exploded. The corridor filled with smoke and an acrid smell – and then Techne laughed as Rossck stepped before her cell, grinning cockily. He swiped the keycard taken from the shocktroopers legs, and her lock opened with a chirrup.

"Lets get the fuck out of here," Techne said.

"Aye aye, Captain!"

***

The rain of shells abated from the San Diego long enough for a silvery dart the size and length of a Hegemonic corvette to plunge into the front windows of the Victrix's bridge. The officers in-front of it had enough time to scream out once before the boarding pod opened and started to fill the air with stubberfire. Slug rounds thudded into armored uniforms, stitching across the kevlar fabric before finding heads and pulping them. Quah, who had been trying to direct fleets of missiles, dove for Adoran, knocking him onto his back, while Thale jerked his threshold blade free, formatting it into a tall, narrow shield. He planted it and pressed his shoulder against the shield.

Bullets sparked and wined off the shield, while alarms wailed and the call echoed through the ship for reinforcements.

Smoke roiled around the boarding pod and when the stubbers stopped pouring out hot lead and death, the smoke parted as shocktroops in matte black armor stormed forward. They held a mixture of close in boarding weapons: Bilpro acid spitters, shotcannons, claveguns. Each roared and spat death, splashing anyone who the stubbers hadn't swept aside.

And behind them stepped Lord Vorsoth.

In the flesh.

He looked nearly identical to the body he had worn while in the throne room of the late and unlamented Emperor Rehoboam. Same digitigrade legs. Same armored chest. Same wicked threshold ax, glowing and sparking. Same cape. But then Thale saw the difference: His shoulders had a pair of sturdy looking tubes attached to them, with massive drum magazines. Thale thrust out his hand and decided to screw fucking around: His power hammered into the shocktroopers, engaging their emergency trauma systems. If a limb was too mangled to be saved, shocktroopers' armor would snip it off with a lightning fast iris tourniquet built into the shoulders, knees, thighs.

One trooper fell, legless, screaming. Another's arms dropped. It was almost comically bloodless, the devices working to prevent bleeding out – even as they amputated perfectly functional limbs. But then Vorsoth charged towards Thale.

"No Venn to protect you now, mutant!"

Thale jerked his shield free and reformatted it in the same flowing motion, pirouetting around and slashing his blade up, catching the ax-blow meant for his head on his guard. Sparks flared and he smirked at Vorsoth. His eyes flashed.

"Lets end this."

Vorsoth bellowed in wordless fury.

And the reinforcements surged onto the bridge – led by Sergeant Antares, chain-bayonet roaring.

***

Techne, Mal and Rossck had just gotten to the hanger bay of the San Diego when the ship took four nukes at once. They were tiny nukes. Nukettes, really. They were barely city smashers – closer to tactical ordinance. They stitched their way along the spine and port hull of the conical ship, and in a single second, they changed the San Diego from a proud, bloodied worldkiller to a heeling, barely intact wreck. The armor plating peeled away from burning holes and bodies by the hundreds tumbled through the gaping gaps in hull and corridor, flipping end over end as they poured into space.

Techne shook herself as she stumbled to her feet, her head ringing. Beside her, Mal was on his back, bleeding sluggishly from where a chunk of debris had glanced off his forehead. Rossck was pinned to the wall, his hands gripping where a thin metal pole had fallen and pierced through his left thigh. He rolled his head back, breathing shallow and fast through his nose. "Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!" he snarled.

Mal groaned.

Techne stood up, shaking her head from side to side. "Okay, uh, hold tight!" She said, putting her hand on Rossck's shoulder. "Stay here!"

"Captain!" Rossck snarled.

"What?" Techne looked back, ready to smack him if he asked her to leave her behind.

"If you leave me behind, I'm gonna fucking haunt you," Rossck snarled.

"That's my Rossck!" Techne said, before turning and running out of the adjoining corridor and into the hanger deck. The nukes had rippled their kinetic energy through the ship – a bit like an earthquake in a cave system. Depending on the structural design, a room might have crumpled like an egg or shaken things off without much of a glance. For the hanger system, it had been a mixture of sturdy design and chaos. The ceiling and walls hadn't buckled. But the gantry system that serviced areospace fighters and shuttles hadn't been quite so rigorous.