ALL NOVEL Far Future Ch. 319 - Ignition
The outside of the Death Ship was blazing vivus, necroic metal was blazing like tinder, and every energy conduit was a line of death boring into the ship... and that included all of its guns.
The captain of the ship fired regardless, spewing corpse lightning, particle-decaying quantum-foamic acids, spatial-erosion fields, and of course Blacklight Rays and Dead Shots, trying to get through our shields.
Brilliant explosions of positive and negative energy detonated on The Hard Light shields of the Dojo, streams of blackness writhed across the brilliant white of the hull and ignited as ablative fields of radiant energy sprayed kaleidoscopes in every direction.
The kids and crews out there in the Gunboats said it looked like all the fireworks shows evah, and at least four spectra were involved. Quite captivating if you have polyspectral Sight...
Sunny had popped in a minute or two earlier, and the Alias VI-class Scout ship North Pole Byrd and Cook were in had all the sensors up to record everything. Light and Dark interactions at this level were things that could yield tons of extreme minutiae, which could add up into things like, oh, Galaxy Guns, or something.
The explosion of Light in so many spectra blinded the deathship, whose sensors were burning away anyways, and whose guns were like fuel hoses attracting the flames all over to them.
Vented matter, energy, and spiritual annihilation silently fawooshed into unwhite flame, and the reality-decaying energies became fuel for the veil.
I saw the pulse through the ether as the vivus reached the Death Furnace, and really, really bright Light started leaking through the nega-charged hull, spreading forwards like little laser-pinpricks eating through the most thickly-charged gaps in the ship. It washed forwards as the psions all cursed and clutched their heads, feeling a massive wave of hate and fear spilling out of the vessel...
The wave of Light blew forwards, and that broadcast dread washed away smoothly, leaving a mighty vivic candle burning in the void.
“Someone get a self-replicating Solar Furnace here.” Because right now we had pretty much most of a world full of Light, Life, and Creation-Energized Elements to play with, and I wanted all of them. The Elvar were going to be crowing for stuff to make a Starhome or nine out of, too. “Oh, and Briggs? Burn them!”
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Aboard the Celestial Tribute, Archduke Briggs looked at the seven different undead clones. The Vat-makers had firmly replicated each of these undead models... gene-modded humans, at the upper limit of base physicality so as not to test any universal laws, psi-dead, absolutely identical DNA.
Cheaper and easier to make than randomizing from a select million-some variants as was usually done with Vatting, getting you exactly what you wanted, and since they were just going to die anyway, no need to worry about Axiom or other things getting involved.
With a tap of his Hammer Beat, the Necrotao True Death Resonators on their chests were crushed.
True Death fed into each undead clone, and consumed the negatively-unliving things body and soul, feeding them to the Land... or the Void, but the Veil was everywhere, so it all applied.
True Death also instantly destroyed anything possessing spiritual resonance with them. This was an effect specifically designed to eliminate Clones of Spellcasters, psychic Clones of mentalists, phylacteries of liches, contingent bodies prepared for body-jumpers, and the like.
As those seven clone-undead died, so did every undead clone like them in existence, wherever they were hidden.
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“The Celestial Beacon just flickered!” Navigator Kiambe swore, shocked. The Beacon had been a psychic truth for millennia, lit and never wavering, more permanent than whole worlds... and now every psion in the galaxy had just seen it falter.
The simultaneous destruction of perhaps trillions of undead to True Death via Resonance all at once was a thing.
“It’s fading!” the coffee-skinned psion went on, a statement echoed a million times over by mentalists in the Markspace. They were all watching as the Beacon wavered in its unfailing strength, and began to dim.
The Light of the Empire faded from the outer reaches of the galaxy first, and could no longer be psensed, similar to when the Rift was in the way. Psions stationed all over the bloody place, of multiple races, watched as the defiant Light that had been a waypoint and standard of navigation through the Warp pulled back, and down, and down...
It steadied only when it fell back to the Imperial Sector, barely reaching the flickering edges of the many systems currently engaged in brutal warfare with the invading Warp forces.
I eyed the posted battle results of the attack on the Sepulcher and Tomb worlds. They were universal victories, if not universal absolute massacres. Some had captains more responsive who managed to engage their inertialess drives and escape to the stars... with no idea that our Scouts were tailing them in Tachyon Bubbles. Too, not all the ships out Collecting came back to be butchered, as the Emperor reached out immediately to warn them not to return to their bases.
“Send out the letters,” I said, and deliveries commenced.
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I had written out a message under combined Corunsun stamp and Twilight Seal to all the Legions outside the embattled Imperial region... many of whom had been recalled to fight in the Imperial Sector, and forced to abandon their own Marshal Worlds in so doing. What remained behind were token forces to secure their holdings against pirates and raiders, little more... but still were enough to recognize those Seals, wary as they were of their intent, and then investigate alongside the messenger, a Rantha or Briggs happy to help them facilitate a very somber matter with their Tremblesense.
While not all of the Legions were surprised, all of them that had strong ties with the Mechanists were very, very unhappy to find that the tombs of their interred dead were occupied by artificial constructs of calcium and carbon meant to fool routine scans, and the actual bodies of their brethren that had died in service to the Empire were gone...
The Legion Commanders and Ministers were even less happy to find out about the existence of the Sepulcher Worlds, and the undead forces massing there... and over two thousand ships confirmed lost in the Warp, converted to Tombships for the undead, present at those worlds of death. We didn’t tell them anything... we just gave them all the evidence and let them come to their own conclusions.
Those conclusions were generally soul-shakingly grim. Of course they knew the Emperor was crystal bones on the crystal throne, hanging onto life by a thread. The fact He was not alive, and indeed had been a lich for millennia, and furthermore the best interests of the living were no longer His primary objective, was a soul-shredding blow to valiant companies of fighting men sharing the Emperor’s genetics, and fighting and dying in His name to defend humanity.
Similar messages under Twilight Seal were sent to Planetary Governors, Twilight Dukes, Mentat Grand Elders, and Fleet Admirals.
As the stars began to shake with the revelations, the Emperor finally began to move those undead forces.
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“Pop the Sunburst Bombs.”
A long, long time ago, there was a game with a magic device called a Wand of Illumination. Nothing much special about it, save for its most powerful effect: Sunburst, an attack spell doing 6-36 damage to undead, no saving throw.
Of course, everyone wanted the spell that went with it, so their wizards could cast it, but it was much time before such was invented... and when it did, it was absurdly high Valence to Cast.
Using The Light for a spell wasn’t that much harder than using Fire, all things being equal, especially considering the narrow range of creatures it was useful against. But when anti-carbon meets Light Carbon in the middle of all your hidden fleets of ships, many of whom just lost a bunch of their crews, things get really bright, really fast.
The kinetic yield was just like a good anti-matter bomb, 100% mass to energy, good schtuff. There was just a lot more of the pure Radiant energy that undead loathe so much as a percentage, and when your ablative-decay hulls get devoured like gasoline, well, that IS unfortunate, isn’t it?
The Bonescythes hadn’t gotten into all the places, but they’d gotten into a bunch of them. Too, we hadn’t found all the hidey-holes, but we’d found the vast majority of them, gotten into them, and left some polite surprises for them as all those vast hidden hangars of Deathships powered up... and all that energy fed the follow-on vivus.
The anti-matter explosions alone blew nation-sized holes in isolated, off-limits areas on Venus, Mars, Mercury, Luna, and a couple scattered moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Those explosions were EXTREMELY bright, and they burned with unwhite fire as hundreds of billions of undead were reduced to drifting white ash at each place. Shattered, now-shiny ships crashed to the crystallized white floors of their hangars one after another, a mist that wasn’t of air swirling thickly about them as they went silent.
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-They are opening the Necrodomes!- Mata /relayed to me, her spotters all over those things, not that the action was all that hard to spot. Megatons of durasteel do not move quietly. -There are deathships in isolated hangars moving into orbit on Tellus in an Omega Sanction spread! They are preparing to slaughter and Reanimate the planet!-
Holds of ether-binding force loosened, projected down at the planet below. Inside those columns of black force were uncounted millions of incorporeals of all stripes: shadows, phantoms, wraiths, spectres, ghosts, wisps, witchfires, probably even banshees made from drow.
It was a Spectre Bomb. Kill someone, turn their soul into an enslaved spectre, have them keep killing, multiplying the numbers impossibly fast. Incorporeals could go right through walls: there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from them.
Better yet, the soulless shells of the dead were then prime fodder for Reanimation. A two-for-one, and you wouldn’t have to worry about anyone complaining about you making mommy and daddy your undead slaves for eternity, because they would be, too.
Add to that the vast armies coming out of those necrodomes, and things just got crunk.
-Blow the Grimbright Bombs,- I /ordered.
Six Bonescythes sitting out in the void on forgotten satellites that hadn’t worked for a thousand years smiled and hit the buttons.
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Remember how I mentioned Sunburst was a high Valence effect? Well, one thing was true, in that it scaled magnificently.
Now, working with Light materials at the TL19/20 was beyond us, and we did have to bring in the very best of the Elvar to make up the Light Copernicum and Life Fermium, and the Creation Oganesson we actually had to trade for from a Mythos race who dwelt in the photosphere of blue giants (Tisha Rantha and Komeks Briggs, kudos for finding a mortal plane elemental race of energy-beings who didn’t want to reduce all cold matter to plasma), among other crazy things that went into them...