For Eyeball, this situation was both strange, and brand new. He was on an alien world, in an alien place… but he knew these people. The last time he’d been stranded like this had been a struggle, yes…. But he’d had a copy of Ascension on-hand to get the job done, help him get out.

He looked around the small structure; the reinforced pyramid contained both the man’s modest home… built against one wall; as well as a form of transportation; a treaded, domed monstrosity about ten meters long, with a set of four spikes at each corner.

Stalwart pointed at the vehicle. “That’s a crawler. It can move, even if the shield fails, just in case… but its got its own shield, or else it’d be a damn unsightly ride to town. You want me to get you to the Embassy, right?”

“If possible, yes.” He glanced behind him, at the now closed door, considering the slaves he’d left behind. “Mind if I ask why bother with the slaves? Even in gravity like this, robots have to be more efficient.”

The Shivan shrugged… and as Eyeball strapped into the seat beside his own, activated the shields; the four spikes glowing softly, a hatch recessing into the earth… and it started to move out… crawling at a slow, but steady, pace down a highway.

“Well. Its all part of the Great Plan. Not a big one… but part of it nonetheless.”

He leaned back in the chair, smiling. “These natives… slow and stupid as they are… were a band of war-like savages when we arrived, and had dominated their world… as is only natural.”

He turned to Eyeball. “But… they were so much stronger than any native life, when the ancient technology failed… they never bothered to remake it. They slowly lost their brilliance, their drive… and became… what they are today. Useless.”

Devolution? Possible. “Still doesn’t explain why you bother to keep them.”

“Ahh! But that’s the thing.. We don’t plan to keep them for good. You see… the Great Plan requires a huge, unfathomable amount of biomass. Two million times as much as the homeworld. So this huge, heavy world… is going to get broken into smaller ones. About a dozen of them. We’re going to take all the biomass of this world… slaves, plants, animals… and blend them into a pulp… to use for seeding the new worlds.”

More planet-eating Empires? What were the odds?

“Why not just grow it in tanks, in solar orbit? Feed in minerals and water, grow some sort of Algae….”

Stalwart nodded. “We probably will, for much of it. But spreading a bit of natural, grown stuff in should help, we think. Or the Planners think. Someday, when the Republic has fallen, the Empire will inhabit a great ring, with as much land, as many people, as all the worlds of the Confederation combined. We won’t go out to conquer and dominate like the Republic…. But those who gaze upon the vast might of the Shivan will bow before us.”

The crawler was…. Slow. Extremely slow.

“How far away is the embassy? The spaceport?”

The Shivan looked down at the console. “Ohh… just a few hours drive. Good thing I just fed the slaves, eh? Hah! Don’t worry, it drives itself.”

Eyeball stared at the display, and leaned back in the seat. The translator was doing better, over time, or he was getting used to the Shivan language. Either way, the conversation seemed to flow more naturally the more they talked.

“So. What do you think of the non-Descendents out there? The ones who evolved on their own? Are they going to become part of the biomass? Going to go seeking out all the others and add them too?”

He shook his head, both clusters of bug-like eyes blinking. “Of course not. The Shivan Empire will not expand. The whole point of the great Ring is that it is the world blessed by the birth of our ancient Emperor, whose foresight and wisdom guide us in the great plan. Why… the great plan forbids expansion unless we’ve completely filled the great Ring!”

A ring-world would have enough room for more population than a small galaxy worth of habitable planets. If a civilization was actually allowed to build one, and grow to fill it, it could expand across the galaxy like a wave of locusts.

All of this was beside the point. He needed to create a magic ritual, or spell. One that would propel a ship into orbit. And he needed an FTL drive; any sort of FTL drive, even a shoddy, malfunctioning one…. To get him back to Ascension. To the Confederation.

Hell, even the Shoork would be an upgrade; they just wanted to vassalize other races for their Queen, not use them as fertilizer.

When they reached the neatest city of this godforsaken high-gravity hellhole, the whole place was made of thousands of pyramids of various shapes…and had more pillars, clearly the gravity protection system, forming a ring around it. Eyeball frowned.

“...Why all the pyramids, anyway? Why not more domes, or boxy shapes?”

“The Pyramids are a sort of pre-fab built for the heavy gravity. This isn’t a permanent settlement… so we don’t make permanent structures here. The Embassy is even a pre-fab. Right over there.”

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He stared at the pyramid, virtually identical to all the others; he couldn’t recognize the language on the banners in front of it, much less anything else, and the translator… eventually kicked in.

~Confederate Embassy~. Creative. He turned to the Shepard. “Thanks, Stalwart.” and turned back… heading to the embassy… only to stop, dropping flat to the ground… as something burst past over his head, slamming into one of the shining white walls of the embassy.

Behind him. A Shoork soldier; holding some sort of energy weapon. Even as he dropped flat, he raised Titanslayer; and with a discordant boom, the soldier’s head and torso vanished…. Alongside a wall behind him, revealing a clear sky…

He frowned, rising to his feet. That… was close. His precognition wasn’t up to par. He’d only had a couple seconds of warning there. Was it something Svetlana had done… was he off his game… or…

Huh. His powers were better when Apollo had been knocked out of commission. Had she somehow copied his powers? Or…. gotten knocked up with a precog baby?

No… it wouldn’t work that fast. Besides, he had more important things to worry about.

An armored vehicle; another crawler, clearly built to survive the heavy gravity; pulled to a stop, the mammoth dark grey vehicle equipped with a massive turret; the most classic tank design he’d seen since earth. Around it, people were running, screaming… into buildings… away… there were no vehicles in sight, other than Stalwart’s crawler and that of the soldiers.

A loud blaring noise. “This is the Shivan Imperial Army to the Confederate Soldier. Place your weapons on the ground and surrender, or be destroyed. The treaty has been violated; our nations are now in a state of war. If you come quietly, you will be imprisoned rather than executed.”

Well. That simplified things. He pointed his false hand at the tank, considering for a moment… push. Pull. Implode. Explode.

He worked through the symbols in short order as the sound of wrenching metal could be heard. Titanslayer would make short work of it… but he wanted a starship. Something he could get into orbit… and hopefully beyond.

The tank ruptured; its walls spreading, revealing its contents; a trio of unarmored Shivan army personnel, the same weird bug-eyes, pale skin… grey uniforms. They seemed in a panic… one of them was going to try to shoot him.

A loud ‘Chunk’ sound… a Pale One shell slammed into the soldier’s torso as Eyeball calmly walked closer… the other two soldiers looking at him, clearly terrified, as their friend fell to the ground, writhing in pain… and he leveled the same gun at them.

“You two. I’m not actually a Confederate member. Not that that helps. I need a way offworld.”

The first one blinked… the appearance disturbing, with all the countless tiny eyes. “Please… there’s no way offworld. That Ascension vessel… it put a railgun round into every grounded ship, and more into the ones that were in orbit. We… there’s no fleet left here.”

“....Show me the closest ship.”

That poor beetle who’d decided to stay behind and help on Klendathu had mentioned that his people used magical foci like his own to launch ships into orbit. No reason he couldn’t do the same. Maybe even beyond. If Svetlana had taken out the regular engines, but not the warp drive… he might be back in business.

“...Yes… sir… but… there was a corvette on Embassy grounds. It should be right… there.”

The two both tried to avoid looking behind him… as he leveled Titanslayer behind him, at more of the Shivan soldiers in their immaculate white armor… and right as they came around the side of the nearest pyramid… another shot. Another.

The two men were just… gone. The building behind them was starting to collapse.

“Fine. Come with me.” He waved the gun at the embassy… and the man with the Pale One embedded in his torso rose, woodenly walking towards it… while the other two stared at him in horror… before continuing as well. They had no idea what was going on… but they were terrified.

***

There were six various species of men and women at the landing platform, wearing simple yellow-black engineering uniforms, inspecting a 40-meter long starship; it was a beautiful, arrow-shaped construct, all done in hues of oranges, reds, and purples, clearly a civilian or diplomatic ship, made to look pretty, to impress… and there was a neat, precise hole right through it, perhaps two meters from the back.

Eyeball looked it over for a moment, approaching…until a pair of armored guards stepped forward, blocking his path, dull green armor that almost put him in mind of Republic troops… except that the color was wrong… their faces invisible through the helmets, they looked him over for a moment… then the prisoners.

The first one shook his head. “You. I’ve been told about you. I’m sorry, but while we’re supposed to extend you every courtesy… we’re going to be surrendering to the Shivans momentarily.”

He glanced back at the ship. “The precision of whoever shot it is incredible. The main thruster assembly is… just gone, the warp drive thrown off its moorings… it’d take days for us to be able to escape. And from the sound of things, we have minutes before a full force comes to kick us offworld.”

Eyeball gave a slow nod. “That’s fine. If they can get the warp-drive back in place, I can get it into orbit. How long would that take?”

The guard blinked… “...Come on.”

With one guard standing with the Shivan prisoners, Eyeball sprinted alongside the other… and one of the engineers; a form of descendent who looked almost suspiciously Marrick-like, a pale woman with four dull black eyes in two pairs on either side of her face.. Glanced his way.

“Wasting time here. It’d be nice to leave while there’s nothing in space to catch us… but she’s not going anywhere.”

Eyeball studied her for a moment. “Look. I can use magic. Get the ship off the ground, and into space. How long would it take for you to patch the hole, and get the warp drive running, if you didn’t need the main thruster to reach orbit?”

She blinked. “...If we could reach orbit, we could probably get an engine off of some of the scrap out there using our maneuvering thrusters… at least fifty ships were in-system and got destroyed, at least one of them must have a mostly intact engine.”

She looked at the ship for a few seconds. “Patching the hole is seconds. We have stuff to do that in-flight; on the ground its trivial. Aligning the warp core so it won’t kill us is also much easier on the ground… maybe an hour or two.”

“So. If I can hold off the Shivans for a couple of hours, and then launch us into space…. You can get us to a rendezvous point?”

“...Well, sure. But… how the hell would you be able to hold off a whole city’s worth of soldiers for two hours?”