A jet-black ship, quiet as a ghost, even its drives baffled and barely visible, slid past his windows, passing within fifty yards of both bioship and dreadnought. Precise saber beams hissed out, and the multitudes of organic cables, psi-enhanced and stronger than steel, were snipped off as cleanly and clearly as trimming a rosebush.

“Fire port pressors! Fire port cannons!” Admiral Colos screamed into the coms, as the black ship rippled and faded away into nothing.

Pressor beams licked out, and drove the massive bulk of the mothership and the dreadnought mutually apart. As they did, all the remaining guns that could fire opened up at point-blank range, from inside its shields.

A solid wall of explosions danced down the side of the mothership, shoving it even further away as rippling waves of flesh coursed back and forth over it, somehow managing to absorb the devastating impact without significant injury, it was so massive. Three of its four engines mangled, the crippled Glory to Dawn could only attempt to increase the distance, pitting pressors against gravikinetics and massive TK to hold the bulky Xenos mothership off while desperate crews loaded the cannons and fought the fires and spore carriers that had dropped xenosyms throughout the four-thousand-meter length of his ship.

“Glory to Dawn, this is the Bared Saber. Hold all fire for ten seconds, please,” the distinct voice of the Coronal Captain Tiffany came over the coms. She managed to sound airy and distracted even in the middle of a battle.

What? Where was she? What was she planning to do? “Hold all fire until my Mark!” Colos’ voice rang out, and the shooting and even the pressor beams going out came to an eerie halt. The enemy ship was growing rapidly, the miles of forced distance shrinking back again quickly.

A white blur shining like the sun came in from forwards and slid right along the mothership’s hull, slicing along the site of the initial furious barrage from just moments ago, and split open that massive hull-hide like opening up a rotten tomato before jetting off and beyond them, and was gone from sight in seconds.

“Glory, you may resume fire,” the airy voice informed them lightly.

“All cannons, fire at will!” he shouted, staring at the massive, gaping wound sliced through the length of the enemy ship, giving his ship and her very experienced gunners clear targets to vent their ire upon.

The next momentous discharge of cannon fire didn’t have to eat away at the hull to get to the real stuff inside, and the heavy cannons did horrible things to the innards of the mothership before it could rotate the massive wound away and out of their line of fire. Whole sections of scabrous biolightning emitters and glowing plasma-vomiting orifices went dark as fusion fire erupted throughout the insides of the hull, and he saw two squadrons of bombers peeling over as the mothership was rotating away to take advantage of the target. Their shouts of excitement as they swooped into line with the spinning monstrous gash and let loose their loads at point-blank range were electrifying.

Small suns blew that gash open and out, and the mothership shuddered in its death throes. His pilots were already attempting to maneuver opposite the rotation of the creature, and greet the wound as it came from the other side, rotating the ship to take the discharges still coming from the mothership on multiple shields to lighten the load. As the burning gash came around, the Glory to Dawn’s eager guns came into line as well...

----

Admiral Colos clenched his fist as the Glory’s guns pounded the hulking mass of the mothership into flaming, actinic ruin. Still, his engines were offline, and his ship was crippled. Their Jamming speed would be crippled, and the handful of light-minutes to Janus Prime was now nearly two hours away.

He kept one eye on the fighting and one on the battle results, and winced despite himself. Over half of the ships of the Fleet were gone. Normally, losing a crew didn’t actually mean much, as the ship could be salvaged, rebuilt, and recrewed for much less than building it anew. But the way the xenosyms devoured the crew and strengthened themselves meant they had to be denied any biomass, and so suicide explosions to take the biovores out with them once they closed meant absolute losses of both the crew and the far more precious vessels.

This battle would cripple the strength of the Imperial Fleet in this system for years, if not decades.

And it wasn’t like there were reinforcements coming. Two neighboring systems were already in the middle of fights, one from raiders and internal revolution of Warp fanatics, and the other being constantly harried by a strong Goblin presence that was simply ruining all the outer defenses and mining settlements of the system in a haphazard, yet enthusiastic manner. Any spare strength the Fleet could give them was already committed elsewhere.

If the Reserve Fleet hadn’t somehow been activated so fast, they would have been wiped out. He watched the deft movements of the Reserve fleet, the clear precision in movements and tactics of a truly united force, and felt a sour feeling coming up from his belly as they moved precisely, in tight formations and unified purpose, to clear out the rest of the remaining bioships who had not turned and run.

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They had only given him perfunctory notice with their hails, claiming static and uncertain communications, and clearly having no desire to stop what they were doing to chat with him.

Whoever was in command of their tactics was a genius. He watched the disciplined rotation of the shooters, the subtle ebbs and flows of position that drew the bioships this way and that, and the way small openings exploded into major cracks and opportunities were seized on with the ferocity of sharks eager to feast.

Whoever was manning those Reserve ships were performing like blooded veterans of a dozen campaigns as they scissored and split the remaining bioships. He kept one eye on both their execution of classic flanking and broadside tactics, and some of the most subtle positioning and overlaying maneuvering he had ever seen. The bioships seemed more like willing partners in a deadly dance, rather than the aggressive, fortified creatures that had wiped half his fleet from existence, and crippled virtually all the rest.

Just who were these captains? He pulled up their names and battle records... and just stared.

Fresh Academy graduates on their first commands?!?

He blinked at the showing of the names, and immediately noticed that several of the names were surnamed Briggs or Rantha.

Rantha... was that not the surname of the captain of the Coronal ship?... and... he pulled it up quickly, the Umbran vessel that had cut the Glory free from the killing embrace of the Xenos mothership?

Shocked, he pulled up their records in more detail, skimming through them with a practiced eye. Academy records were important, in their way, but too many officers did well in Academy and then lost it all in a real fight when their lives were on the line, or failed to perform in an unscripted fight with lives on the line as in simulations with no personnel cost.

Ancients? All of the Briggs... were Ancients?

He almost could not believe what he was seeing. The Ranthas... the Ranthas were Nymphals?!? Those ears were very distinctive, and they were popular in high-end brothels that he might have visited a time or two...

The others were a scattering of names and faces of various humans, and his expression faltered on seeing a Mus and Canid-blood among them. Who had promoted beast-bloods into his Fleet?

He cursed to himself even as they rescued him from death, chasing away the bioships that certainly would have gathered to finish off him and his crew. His expression didn’t change as he found the assessments and addendums, and then the orders for assignment and deposition.

Rear Admiral Chondryce was the Orders’ woman in the command hierarchy, and anything odd they wanted done inevitably went through her, since nobody else really wanted to deal with their assets being used by the Orders in their exceptionally perilous missions. There was great glory working for the Twilight Orders, and even more often, there was death.

She had signed off on all crew assignments as part of her logistical duties, as well as the repair and upgrades to every single mothballed ship at Threshold Station. She did not have the true authority to bring them out, nor the budget... but the Twilight Orders did, and they had made it so, without bothering to inform him.

It was a breathtakingly prescient move, and he gnashed his teeth at being kept out of the loop. The information security had been incredibly tight, since nothing had been flagged by Fleet Security... or, more likely, those elements of Fleet Security who had noticed it had deduced who was responsible, and wisely kept very silent unless they wanted to be on the next ship skirmishing with urgob H-K’s in Argos system...

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The Xenos assault on Janus III went... poorly.

The Threshold Stations guarding Janus III were at a distinct disadvantage any way you looked at it. Although Stations could be built far larger than ships, the fact was those stations were put there for reasons that generally didn’t mean 100% military firepower. Trade and repair were the two most common reasons, while purely military platforms tended to be far smaller and more condensed.

As a result, the advantages of a mobile force with lots of numbers and spread out over the unlimited volume of space had a massive advantage over a static force, regardless of size. The incoming Xenos only had to bring their forces to bear on one station at a time, pound it to ruin, and move on to the next. Even if they could fire in support, the bulk of the planet blocked any direct beam attacks, and missiles and torpedoes had to navigate a hellstorm of psychic and electromagnetic interference to find a target.

The incoming Xenos fleet wasn’t worried about it at all, and picked an outlying Threshold station on the far side of the planet to crack open its approach lanes and proceed with its attack.

The missile massacre that came flying in was jaw dropping.

Hidden among belts of clustered satellites active and dead, space debris, mined-out asteroid scrap, and abandoned wrecks, the missiles and torpedoes sent into orbits hours earlier converged on Threshold Station II with eerie, fantastic synchronicity. Guidance systems bolstered with Vakker-tech upgrades switched on, navigated the surge and tumbling interference, while a few new blinky-blinky satellites with rainbow lights switching within them hissed and heated as they denied the psychic interference trying to scramble everything. They linked up with the torpedoes and missiles, allocated them with scrambling fingers elsewhere spot-assigning thousands upon thousands of them, and set them off.

Whole armories of missiles and torpedoes lit up together. Their drives lit up with thousands of small suns as their simple little mechanical minds cheerfully sent themselves on a collision course with the hundred-some incoming bioships.

They hurtled past the window displays of the stunned Captain He of Back Threshold, who had been certain he was about to live his last hour, the greatest and most glorious meteor shower of the Emperor’s Wrath he had ever witnessed. He had been angered and nervous when told to eject his entire complement of ranged ordnance, fearing he was shooting himself in the foot, and now... now every single Threshold Station of Janus III was firing in direct support of him, all at once.

He would not forget it for the rest of his life.

Neither would the Xenosyms.

All the missiles hit. Every single Threshold station was emptied of all of them, and they all came at once, their twinkling little Vakker-circuits bulling through the pulses that were sparking and shorting their AMT circuits here and there, constantly receiving corrections and updates, and on course as they picked their targets and went valiantly to their deaths... and the death of the Xenos.