Saucer had created a wide variety of weapons, emplacement, traps, and environmental effects in the eighteen minutes they’d had to prepare for the rat swarm and then the subsequent hour and a half of screaming, incoherent madness.

The gravity waves had been the only meaningful contribution that the great wounded titan whom they had notionally come to the aid of could muster. Nothing more direct would work against what it referred to as the rats’ “formation-generated resonance effect” and which Nathan just labeled as a ritual. The rest had all been the Earther’s and his partner-and-equipment’s work: razor wire and incendiaries, mists of acid, mines and bombs and spatial inversion grenades, localized fields where the laws of physics worked in different and highly incompatible ways, turrets and guns and jagged stalagmites.

Most of the killing had been done by the gravity waves, whose irregular patterns of constructive and destructive interference could dash rats into the walls, throw off their formation and open them up to more targeted attack, or simply rip them in half if the eddies hit just right. But the other measures had taken their appropriate tithes, and critically had slowed down and kept contained the waves of the swarm. That had allowed Nathan to maintain some distance and keep the rats on his tail as he fled, which meant the space-whale didn’t have the swarm of rats burrowing into its flesh and fusing with each other in a bid to create a new queen.

This was not precisely how a new queen was formed, but it was well thought of the whale to give Nathan a simplifying lie. Some things are best left unspoken, unwritten.

Regardless, when Nathan turned to face the oncoming horde, those overwhelming tens of thousands of rats who remained, it was with a knowledge of everything that worked and everything that had not. The rats, too, had this knowledge—over and over, they had adapted, changing their tactics and becoming faster, more nimble, and hardier—but they were mindless in their frenzy for all their brilliance. Without a queen, they were a ravenous horde with only the drive to consume and then spawn a new matriarch.

Reader, perhaps it must be asked: why, when they did have a queen, did they remain in their feeble and febrile state? Why was the queen nigh-catatonic, and the swarm so widely distributed?

These rats, psychic monstrosities with an endless hunger for flesh as they were, had been plagued by a fact of their evolution. The circumstances of their environment had changed, and the conditions no longer existed, anywhere in their universe, for the creation of a queen—it was as though maleness was stripped from them, severed by the fickle knife that is the collated and singularized winds and whims of Fate; it was as though only princesses remained to them, with the last prince having died in a basement somewhere, vivisected, its torments mocked in a quippily mutilated slogan on a coffee mug.

And so do universes survive, when otherwise they might have died; and were it not to have been so, Nathan would never have been sent to that universe, but rather to one which was more suited. And so it was ever going to be the case that there were no more rat-kings, and when he gave the command to fire, he did it knowing full well that there might never be a rat-queen again as a result.

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It was a Shardbust Flechette Hypervelocity Feedcannon, and this is what that meant:

It was a Feedcannon, a type of weapon which would accept a material input and manufacture its ammunition on the spot as it fired. Though of course, nearly every cannon was a Feedcannon, to such a thing as Saucer.

It was a Hypervelocity weapon, which Saucer did not find worth mentioning; a weapon which fired its projectiles at speeds that were beyond the mundane in some manner or another. Of course, a trivial construct such as the cannon Saucer would make in a pinch was hardly going to fire superliminal projectiles, but ones which traveled just faster than the perception of whatever it was targeting, regardless of what that speed was? That was well within its capacity.

It was a Flechette Feedcannon, which fired a wide spray of slender needles that were optimized for anti-personnel use. (An armor-piercing flechette round is a misnomer. Such a weapon is a needler. If the projectile is not slender, it is a grape, in the sense of grapeshot; if it is a single projectile, it is a javelin; and if it is a narrow spray, it is a terrible idea and such a thing has no purpose in being made, save to tick boxes in a three-by-three chart of the nature of a thing or the semantics of it.)

And finally, the Hyperlocity Feedcannon’s flechettes were prefixed thusly: Shardburst.

What does it mean, for something to possess the Shardburst nature? Reader, attend: for Nathan did not hesitate to fire, and the rounds, as it is sometimes said, went downrange in the expected fashion.

Each flechette flew through the void at multiple times the speed of sound, for it would outspeed the direct perception, though not the reflexes, of the rats. And there were terrifyingly many of them, both of rats and of flechettes, though of course the latter would be required in order to deal with the former.

The flechettes would have seemed to fill the cone of their target environment with a solid wall of metal and bone, were they visible to Nathan’s eye or, for that matter, moving slowly enough that he was able to see them fly. And yet, the rats were in motion before he triggered the volley of projectiles. They knew precisely what the safe zones would be in the deadly hail before the first was fired, just as they had every other time; and some of them would have been killed, but in through every gap and around the edges would flow the vastness of the swarm.

And then the flechettes exploded.

They were miniscule, those flechettes. Far too small to contain submunitions. And even if they did have them, the rats should have known, should have predicted, and they could have slipped outwards into a space beyond the trivial. But the compressed corpse-ball was infused with enough psychic energy to harvest, and likewise the dimensional power the rats had consumed; and the cannon and its ammunition was unlike anything they had faced.

Shielded, the second stage foiled their prophecy.

Contained until that dire moment within folded higher spatial dimensions, the shards burst outwards, fully occupying the manifold liminal spaces and the mundane.

And when the autocannon spun down, there was, finally, silence.

The map was clear, and the rats? Gone.