When Kezia tried to stand up, she gave a grunt... as the ceiling tore apart above her head, sheets of armored steel shredding like paper, allowing her to pass right through... and look right out the exit barrel of the railgun at the alien sky. She blinked, wondering for a moment if the ship had collapsed around her as she performed the ritual; only, as she dropped back down to look at the room, realize.. her armor was in tatters. And the room... was tiny.

She... She had grown. She had actually grown at least somewhat taller after the first time. But this.... she grimaced in irritation as she opened the door, looking out at; Ripper, who was smoothing out his mohawk with his hands and staring at his feet, seeming confused. When the assassin glanced back at her, and blinked, looking her over, she gave a small wave. "I seem to have had a growth spurt. I feel like I'm crawling through a tunnel. Where is everyone else?"

Ripper shrugged. "Ehh. I was originally going to be ferrying folks out, one by one, to disarm bombs. I was halfway through the first trip when I realized they weighed more than my limit. And it wasn't until I came back out I realized that I'd taken Rex, a whole bunch of armor, the floor, and the ceiling. We... just cut our way out through a rear hatch after that. I'm gonna hold off on any more precision work until I've got a better grip on things."

She sighed. "Ah. So what brings you here?"

"Well. I was supposed to ask if the ritual was done, so we could sweep further away from the ship. I assume so?"

"Of course." Kezia started crawling towards the cargo bay, grumbling, with Ripper following. She could hear him on comms. "Alright folks, you can leave the safe area. Ritual is done. And, uh... Kezia is like ten feet tall. Maybe twelve. So as soon as we can get the disrupter offline, we need engineering making her some new quarters." He glanced at her again. "And some new clothes."

***

Captain Moreau stared at the display. All the enemy ships and stations near the planet had gone silent. Their population was nothing compared to the planet itself, but the sort of range that implied was enormous. At this point, Kezia might be able to kill the earth from a bunker on the moon; or kill the Emperor without getting within his own effective range.

His crew; mostly the marines; were sweeping the area around the ship for nukes. He hadn't, initially, been certain what would happen if the Disrupter were turned off before they were cleared.. Would the bombs go off? Remain inert? These weren't human devices; a human ICBM wouldn't have been stopped by a disrupter. Of course, he had an ace in the hole.

His comm beeped. ~Moreau, this is Eyeball. You can kill the Disrupter now. Anything that would go off when we shut it down is disabled. ~

He shook his head, as he tapped the button himself. RC... who had been struggling to patch some broken cables a few moments ago with a level of competence approaching a drunken sloth... seemed to spring to life with a buzz of energy. Damage reports appeared on the display from all across the ship; all but four of the point-defense clusters; some of the downward facing ones; had been destroyed. The railgun had been damaged. The engines damaged. Dozens of small penetrations where something had managed to get between the armor plates; though none of the armor was itself damaged.

The ETA to complete repair was... about an hour. Only fifteen minutes of which needed to be here, on the surface. He chuckled. As creepy as having a swarm of cyborg engineers and damage control robots was, the effectiveness was.... insane. The engineering corps of the french navy was impressive, competent, and did their job well. But these Eye-tech people....

"Are our gunships and fighters still intact?"

RC looked around. "Ahhh... we've lost one of our missile storage bays, so we can't resupply them, but the fighters and gunships are all good to go, and aside from the Dragonslayer, fully stocked. The cargo bay was not breached during the encounter."

Moreau sighed. "Good. Get them in the air. Scout around... and keep an eye on the skies. Make sure there aren't any automated threats, and, of course, keep an eye out for incoming."

The head engineer nodded. "I'll get them crewed, though... I don't think we really need them. Sensors still work, and I'm actually starting to get good results from the Imperial sensor network."

"Send them anyway. If we're sweeping with fighters, they might think we're down here voluntarily, make sure nothing survived... rather than too damaged to leave yet."

***

The view from the sky over the Capital.. wasn't too different from what it had been before, on the larger scale. Still blue and silver. Most of the lights were still on. All of the equipment that had kept billions of people alive, fed, and moving... and it was still running, with nothing to do.. at least, part of it was.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

On the smaller scale, however, looking closer... Rex could see steadily growing signs of the cataclysm Kezia had brought to this world. Corpses starting to float up to the surface by the million. Numerous impact sites from crashing military vehicles; while most of them hit the water, there had been hundreds of thousands of them in the air; quite a few of them had struck something solid when they came down. The civilian ones seemed to... still be moving.

The ocean was... unsettled. He couldn't see the enormous tsunami washing across the surface; but it was there. And if anything had been alive before it hit, it would have been... traumatic.

The surviving spacecraft in the system were keeping their distance; watching from afar and recording everything, not daring to draw too close; barely detectable through the atmosphere. As the gunship did a slow circle, it all just looked... strange. As Rex studied the displays, it was hard to pinpoint just what seemed so disturbing about it. What was undoubtedly the Imperial equivalent of a bus, moving, stopping, moving, on a pre-set schedule, pushing corpses aside as if they were so much dirt and debris. Buildings with missiles, ships, or vehicles embedded in them, and smoke rising. Water boiling from an unknown source far below leading to vast swaths of bubbles and rising plumes of steam.

And overhead... an enormous mass of partially-molten metal that had once been a fleet, bearing down on them, only hours away, looking as if the world had a new moon. This... Rex had been part of this. The death of a world. A world that had once held more life than a hundred earths. And even the ruins of their society were about to be crushed by a giant meteor... or, well. A giant mass of wreckage.

None of this information was really useful. The enemy fleet wasn't coming closer. That giant ball of death was on the same course as it had been when Spike had slaughtered all of those soldiers. He was just flying around to make people think there was a reason the Jeanne hadn't taken off yet. A terrible waste of time for one of the few non-cyborg crew on the ship. First he had to trek around disarming nukes, salvaging any useful parts. Then it was 'you're rated for the gunship, right? Fly around and scout a bit with the others'. But... well.

He slowly turned the gunship around, headed back. By now, they would be doing engine tests. She should be taking off soon.... and when she was ready, they'd leave; and probably lurk in the system, waiting for the Emperor..

But what if the Emperor didn't show? Would Kezia move to another world to lure him in? How far would they take this?

This... wasn't what he'd wanted. He wanted to build crazy dinosaur-robot gadgets and go fight in an arena. The fighting part not absolutely necessary. While cruising space with a hot cyborg girlfriend was fun, all the death and destruction was.... decidedly less so. Granted, he was now so strong he could bench-press a truckload of anvils, so he would probably end up fighting, whether he wanted to or not.

He aimed at the flight deck; watching robots and engineering crew moving over the outer hull, placing new point defense clusters where the old ones had been melted off. Chunks of the engine being cut free and replaced.

And... a tall, pale, glowing woman wearing a purple robe... even seated, she was enormous... talking to RC. Good lord, was that Kezia? As he settled in to land, he realized... she was taller than the gunship. At least ten feet. Twelve. Rex blinked. Had he grown any taller, since the change? His armor had seemed to fit a bit more snugly, and he'd used the same measurements for the new stuff as the older armor he'd accidentally broken after the first ritual... aside from some pseudo-neutronium components, and a much more robust set of prosthetics.

He stepped down the rungs of the ladder, settling onto the deck.... and looked up... and up.. at the seated woman. "Good god, ma'am. Are you.... Are you comfortable being that tall?"

She glanced at Rex... with RC turning towards him as well; and laughed. "Not really. I... actually took the main gun out of commission just by standing up. RC here will have it up and running in no time, though... she's also making me yet another suit of armor. Well. Just a bodysuit. I.... don't really need armor at this point."

She looked up into the sky for a moment, and grimaced. "And... we'd best make it fast. He's almost here. He's getting close enough I can feel him... like another star in the sky, hurtling towards us, faster than a bullet."

***

It was difficult to think of himself as the Emperor, sensing what he did in the system as he arrived. When Samarr observed the Capital, it brought back memories. Of a young, foolish species called the Rikk, with few friends, many enemies, and an unsuitable level of optimism in such a grim universe.

Some of these beings, his chosen, had helped his own people in those days. At least one Rikk had taken shelter, hiding on this very world, before being hunted down and executed; and the Imperials hadn't given him up willingly.

Their choice as his chosen, as the hand by which he administered his galaxy, was made by a few brief moments of goodwill long, long ago. They would survive this. This was, after all, just the Capital; they had many worlds. If one out of every ten Imperials had been slain by the events here today, he would be surprised.

The evidence of battle was clear. That warship must be virtually unstoppable; it had annihilated the entire Imperial defense fleet, eradicated all life on the most heavily defended Imperial world... and even now was taking off; likely intending on cleansing the other, inconsequential, worlds in this system before moving on. Those who arrived too late were watching, likely waiting for his own arrival to report in.

The... 'Empress'. He could feel her, even from light-hours away. A brilliant blaze of glorious power the like of which he'd never seen before; if he could somehow witness his own strength in a mirror, he was certain that's what he would see.

She had come here, had consumed this world, to draw him out. To fight him. As powerful as she might be, she was, as yet, nothing compared to the Emperor. Still. In the long run, she was a threat. Good of her to come meet him here, rather than forcing him to hunt her down.

The fact that the children of Cronos had produced such a being was a clear indicator his decisions were apt; he would need to return, and crush this planet once and for all.

After he killed this Empress and consumed her power for his own, of course.