ALL NOVEL Far Future Ch. 335 – All the King’s Horses...
Watching a thousand-light year wide spatial construct slowly crack and shatter was quite a show, the kids informed me.
Inside was a quite a show, too, but not for the sane.
Warp Storms were howling everywhere, trying to erode away the spatial absoluteness that was snaking its subversive way through the systems of the Abyss. It was perfectly possible to tell where it was going, of course, since it was following after me, meaning I was obviously the cause of it.
Didn’t that cause just a lot of excitement...
Anchor world #3 went down when a certain Axiomatically-Altered Battleship now emblazoned Chaoseater rammed into it, and promptly began to disassemble itself and take over the Forge World devoted to Klaw. It had gained the location in passing from a mysterious message, giving it a map of the Abyss and a nice fat target that even an Axiomatic couldn’t turn down.
Axiomatic domination of the planet did take a while, but the Soulbound Constructs had plenty of reinforcements piling in from multiple systems on ships they’d taken over, and in the end, they dominated and explosively integrated the locals before they could bring in any reinforcements, generally by turning them into fission fuel.
The Anchor Runes of the planet didn’t so much burn as get rewritten in the opposite direction, and the system went from being an anchor to a huge freaking disrupting hole in the formation. Twenty-one systems were ejected in the reality quakes after the Axiomites took it, and being the disciplined and immortal twats they were, they promptly mined the whole planet, too.
When the Warp Fleets converged on the place, the firepower gathered was enough to shake the stars. The Axiomites were plenty happy to give tons of it back, and when the bombardments were finally about to succeed, they simply blew the planet so it couldn’t be re-used. The Axiomatic rejection went away, but the Warp structure that was supposed to find an anchor there to work with found nothing at all, with the result that space-time started flopping around something fierce.
It was the second nova and third anchor to go off, and even if the Warp Fleets got out of there ahead of time, it was basically the nail in the coffin for what was going on. No matter how much Warp energy was howling around now, it couldn’t erase the fact that the Abyss was coming apart, slowly, grandly, inevitably...
------
Of course, all that mess meant they knew where I would be going, so they could concentrate their forces ahead of me, scan for those loathsome trails of reality I was leaving behind, and start cracking apart cubic AU’s of space trying to kill me and stuff.
But really, did I have to explore the whole damn place, and take down all the anchor points? No, no, no... I just had to connect the trails I was leaving, lock down a huge chunk of the place, and watch its internal stresses tear it apart.
Oh, and FYI, a Scout ship with all Voids aboard doesn’t leave a fixed spatial trail...
The aptly named Not In Attendance found the fourth anchor world, set up a lock for Grandmother Sama to Gate into it, and discreetly removed itself from the system before things started going all to shit.
The kids smoothly followed my lead back to my original entry point... and then we rammed an open Mortalgate through the Abyssal Wall about a minute before Galactic Renewal brushed past us.
Tides of spatial flows whelmed in the distance, pan-galactic stresses of the material plane balancing out at profound levels. Their size and power was mighty oceans to a tiny little puddle, but that puddle had been domed and guarded.
For that short minute or three, the puddle had a hole in it, and a gaping void waiting to be filled beyond.
Nature does abhor a vacuum, and as it turned out, this was one that it could fill.
The inertia of the whole galaxy bulged into that opening we’d made, and like water starting on a crack in the dam, it began to follow the path within... and expand.
Its speed was many MANY times that of light, given that it was basically space itself settling in. A flood of hard reality backed by the whole weight of the mortal realm pushed in along those frozen bars and tunnels etched into the fabric of the Abyss, and as the Warp howled at them, Reality kept right on coming in, mindless and hungry.
That first real crack in the wall of darkness, crossing hundreds of light years in an instant, was quite gratifying to see as it spread from that tiny hundred-meter Mortalgate we’d made. We all sat several parsecs in the distance, harvesting data and watching the show (with appropriate containers of popcorn) as the Warp tried to fight back against the flood wearing it away like a blocked river eats away at a breached damn.
(Moooooooooom...) Snicker, snicker...
The structure of the Warp’s intrusion into reality shattered piecemeal, the remaining pieces not structured to support the area that was left, and basically collapsing under the oncoming wave of reality.
Star system after system was ejected from the Abyss, maddening radiances were forced back into the Warp under the crushing tide coming in. Darkness gave way to winking stars, some still in the wrong hues, and space was littered with churning zones of Warp pettiness stewing and churning up space in spite... but the Abyss was cracked, shattered, and collapsed in awful slow motion as the whole galaxy watched.
The Warp couldn’t contain the weight of that much displaced space coming back in narrow volumes, and its expansion was just too much, too fast, especially with how we’d broken key parts of its formation.
Blackness collapsed, unclean lights mostly went away, stars fit themselves back into new places in the galaxy, phlos realigned once again (but we were much better at tracking them now)... and all the systems and worlds that the Warp had claimed and stolen away were now exposed to the rest of the galaxy.
They no longer had their unassailable home.
The wound the Apotheosis of Amourae had inflicted upon the galaxy was finally gone.
I had a big, big grin on my face. Glory Awards like that are hard to come by...
---
Below the galaxy, Briggs was energetically wiping the last of the Xenosym fleets. Two Reaper Fleets were at it, and literally thousands of Gardeners. Ruk Citadels were on overwatch, but there were no Anti-Life within a thousand light years at the moment, as vortices of peevishly launched Warp power were creating storms in all directions, and they were trying energetically not to be caught in them.
Grandmother was back in the Warp. The Axiomatics that had contributed so nicely were all gone.
But the holdings of the Warp marauders that had ravaged the galaxy for five thousand years were sitting out there, a fraction of a Sector in size, and without all the Warp Sorcery defenses that had basically made them impregnable...
---------
Deep into the Imperial Sector, the fighting there came to a slow halt. This was, after all, quite a development.
I didn’t know if I wanted the Empire to head into the Warped Worlds and try to convert them to undead or not, but trying to Animate followers of Riggibuhl was not going to be very effective, and might even rebound on Him badly.
It would, however, create new headaches for us, as undead Warp marauders could start employing the same untiring tactics the Emperor was using.
Unfortunately, He didn’t do so. Maybe He knew we were waiting for Him to dispatch ships from His battle lines that we would then be able to pick off. Pity.
The undead of the Emperor were basically throwing together ships, or repairing old ones and installing necrotech, as fast as they could... which, when you don’t get tired and obey orders without question, could be pretty quick, even if your relative skill Ranks sucked. The necroborgs that used to be Mechanists took care of the second problem there, as the Emperor didn’t actually need all that many things capable of independent thought.
As long as the key production facilities for the necrotech were secured, and enough overseers were there for the mass production, all was good. Without any need for consumer goods, food, water, and the like, ruthlessly polluting production methods were all perfectly fine, and power wasn’t a problem if you didn’t have to heat or cool homes, worry about air supply, or move people back and forth to rest and return.
It was overtime, all the time, and irrelevant goods production lines were gotten rid of and repurposed entirely towards war. There were no arts, no entertainment, no research, no political systems, no media. There was labor, and there were bodies outfitted for war.
While the Emperor didn’t have a renewable source of corpses handy, there were trillions upon trillions of dead for Him to use however He saw fit, and upgrading them for combat service was simplicity itself. He didn’t have to worry about pain or rejection of parts, which made installation of cybernetics much easier once the necrotech interfaces were in place. Upgrades to the physical capabilities of the undead followed quickly.
These necroborgs were fully capable of taking on lesser demons and Possessed average troops. If they were fused into mecha and war machines, they could take on Fallen Legionnaires and more powerful demons, too... and were plenty happy to do so.
If whole worlds burned around them, neither force cared, as it didn’t affect them if a world was living or not.
-----
The seven rebelling Legions that had survived the Wrath of the Emperor and fled were the Dragon (now called the Wyrm), the Tigers, the Wolves, the Bears, the Eagles, the Sharks, and the Tantor. The great Legions were divided into Battalions as normal, but unlike in the Empire, where each Battalion was now independent of control, all the lesser forces were still under the control of the Demon Princes of their Legion, with the Princeless Sharks serving the Wyrm.
All the lesser forces were under the control of the Legions; the Chaos Fleets, Sorcerers, armies, espionage divisions, raiders, and even the infiltrating cults all ended up reporting back to the Legions at some point or another. Oh, there were ‘churches’ to the Warp Gods who thought they were independent and favored of their deities, but if the Demon Princes leaned on them, they crumbled quickly, unwilling to face the dreadful might of the Fallen Sons of the Emperor.
Even powerful demons knuckled under to the technomagic might and conferred Gifts given to the Demon Princes. When the Princes spoke, souls quivered in fear, and the might of the Warp moved.
The vengeance that had driven them for millennia was right before them... but now, an unprecedented sense of crisis was looming over them from behind.
The Abyss had shattered. The worlds and bases they had built up over thousands of years on the blood of uncounted damned souls... were laid bare before the waiting guns of all of living humanity.
Their invasion into the heart of the Tellurian Empire had covered decades. They had long expected the abandoned and isolated worlds of the distant Sectors to fall, especially when the verminous Xenosym attacked in such numbers. Only the Warp could withstand such creatures as that, they were certain, and indeed the Xenosym rarely chose to come to blows with forces of the Warp... although they were quite happy to return the favor if attacked.
But now, a mortal nobleman had risen to conquer the length and breadth of the worlds that had once belonged to the Empire. The abandoned worlds of humanity had become stronger, united, impossibly so...
The hidden agents and cults spoke of corporations and organizations led by men and women with empty psychic power, hunting them through the many worlds with endless patience and tenacity, as grim as the Inquisition and as driven as the Coronals.
They spoke of systems that had been assaulted haplessly for endless years by the Warp, and now, at long last, saw vengeance laid out before them.
And those vengeful ships were starting to move!