Transit to Janus III would have taken the Mekker Fleet a week. Lack of any news or signals happening at that point would prompt something to come here to investigate what was going on.

It was time enough to melt down large chunks of forty different vessels, including the ones with the priciest alloys, and make off with them.

Also, to shoot every survivor with extreme prejudice. Generally with heaping mounds of fusion added to keep all the deaths equitable and everything.

Our fleet cleared out about twelve hours ahead of the Mekker frigate sent to investigate what was going on.

I was perfectly happy to hop aboard that frigate designate #675^a13Q (Mekkers only indulge in names for ships that interact outside their order), compromise their coms, and listen in as half-panicked Mekkers surveyed the ruins of their grand escapade.

Records were dispatched to certain Umbrans and Coronals across the Sector. In powerful areas, word that the Mekkers were revolting and had been going to attack and destroy a loyal Imperial World, and been stopped by Umbran agents, whispered across the Sector.

On the one hand, it was an amazing display of how the Inquisitors of the Umbrans could reach out and touch something as big as a rebel fleet if they really wanted to.

Before the Mekkers could properly react in time and scale, many senior members were being accused of treason and being influenced by cyber-psychosis, and their links to those involved in this terminated invasion were exposed. There were hasty attempts at denial, there were many such Mechanists who abruptly went missing, along with significant assets, and there was violence as jumpy Mekker ships fired at jumpier Fleet assets, and shooting wars in human space erupted.

Then someone who wasn’t us got ahold of some of the evidence of what the Mekkers had been planning, what the Umbrans had done, and suddenly tensions between the two symbiotic halves of the Empire went polar.

The Empire couldn’t survive without the technology controlled and administered by the Mechanists. But the Mechanists had forgotten that they couldn’t survive without the Empire protecting and supplying them, and had made a move against part of the Empire, acting with impunity.

Part of the Empire had slapped them down. Hard. Lethally, every bit as mercilessly as they’d been planning.

From the position of the people, it was the Rise of the Machines all over again. For the noble classes, it was a terrible fear that the Mechanists might decide to eliminate them without caring for law... and it was a wonderful, wonderful opportunity to break their monopolies.

For Imperial authority, it was a challenge to them that they could not back down from... and at the same time, could not realistically afford to prosecute to the full extent required.

Paralysis didn’t need much to start the whole process going, as opportunists, which no, no, no, couldn’t have included Warp Cultists sensing a bloody chance like no other, started whipping up the common people, playing to their fears of cyberization and the Rise of the Machine, and violence against the cybered began to escalate... especially Mekker-backed institutions, and this extended right into the core of Mechanist Forgeworlds.

Schisms rent the sacred collective silence of the Mechanists, as radicals, conservatives, liberals, and moderates of doctrine went at one another, and cooperation dropped drastically. Shutdowns began to spread, putting uncounted masses out of work, adding to the distrust and violent atmosphere, and everything began to worsen.

Only the most merciless enforcement kept key military production open, and the billions and trillions put out of work by the Mekkers began to find targets for their rage.

World after world rose up against the Mekkers, and even highly cybered individuals in general. Revolts blossomed, a lot of very valuable facilities went up in flames, and the elitist Mekkers, so far above the milling masses of humanity, began to die.

Humanity wasn’t going to stand for the Rise of the Machine again.

Through it all, code wove and weft its way through their systems.

You Have Disappointed the God of the Machine.

The Mechanist Cults were shaken. The best of their Coders could not tell where the messages came from, and they appeared on the most secure systems. The greater their infighting, the more who fled from their stations to the stars, or spitefully sabotaged their own systems against the hordes and mobs, the more the message wound through the Boole, across their internal optics, painted itself across their memory cores.

Warp Events triggered by paranoia, hatred, mistrust, and violence exploded, and worlds burned in the darkness of the void...

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The crashing and divisions ripping across the Sector played out over months and years. Cults and power-hungry fools, rabble rousers and opportunists had plenty of time to get plans in place and try to exacerbate the trust issues stretched to the limit after the coming of the Great Rift.

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Mekker borgaii forces were fighting Planetary Guards. Kasr Mecha were dueling with tank and artillery divisions. Supply routes were falling apart, as once coordinated runs ran into pirates and raiders. Drones dueled with air and space fighters. Independent captains abandoned their normal routes to do whatever was most profitable for them at this time.

There were plenty of people doing whatever they could to keep the carnage going. Plenty of aliens were plenty happy to take advantage of it, too.

The elvar were probably the politest of them, just raiding and doing piracy for resources as normal. The drow, on the other hand, were carrying millions off into slavery as they raided hundreds of worlds during the chaos.

The goblins, on the other hand, were having a bit of a time of it. The Imperial Fleet had been hammering them on world after world, and even if they were gathering and consolidating their strength, they were also rattled and running, broken and scattered across the stars. The only ones with the strength and organization to raid were those coming from outside Imperial space...

A dozen elder races moved in here and there for inscrutable purposes, assaulting and taking worlds, killing billions as they wiped the human population from the planets. Perhaps they were sacrifices, perhaps reprocessed biomass, perhaps test subjects or other raw materials.

Even the Sector Throne and Crown worlds were groaning with the conflict. They hadn’t been abandoned by the Mekkers, but instead the schism within them had divided worlds between different philosophies, backed up by hot plasma and burning rocket ammunition.

Some supported their ancient alliance with the Empire, and some took over their worlds entirely and spurned their need for it.

Dead Walking Events spiked across the Sector... except on the worlds with Negative Capacitors. As huge numbers of their work force started rising up and eating the other part, even the most conservative Mekkers paid huge prices for black market Capacitors supplied by Rantha Corp, even if it was blasphemous technology.

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The sole bright spot, if there was one, was the rimward subsector where Janusspace was located.

The power of the Mekkers there had been crippled quite some time before, and the follow-up purge after the failed fleet invasion effectively eliminated any resistance from them, and stopped any Mekker rebellions before they started.

The knowledge that the Fleet was with them, and human, kept any uprisings to a minimum... and those who persisted in trying to rile them up found some curious psions investigating them in ways they didn’t want, and even if they were innocent of being Warp Cultists or dupes, they found themselves volunteering for combat zones where they could fight all the enemies they wanted to themselves, instead of getting others to do it for them.

The worlds and systems we owned weren’t affected by all this nonsense, of course, but we barely scratched the surface of what it meant to be productive on scales required. That was fine, we continued remorselessly producing stuff that made stuff that produced more stuff.

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Ronnie, Mrs. Fantastic, hit Sixteen by overseeing the design and production of the first TL 16 fabber to be constructed in six thousand years.

She was prepping to break Gate technology, Sun Gun designs, apex Tachyon Drives, and penultimate Harmonic Drives.

Blacklight guns were quietly put into production. The Death Capacitors were already in full production, and the powercell lines for the Blacklight Cannons were blithely put into place next to them. Even the Mekkers didn’t want to deal with concentrated negative energy... after the first dozen or so investigations into the Death Capacitors went kiloplex-level bad, and the replacements cost them three times as much as the exorbitant price of their first sets, of course.

The Fleets based at Janus rapidly seized neighboring worlds, assuring themselves of continued supply chains, and those worlds of security. Easily forty percent of the Mechanist Guilds on those worlds had to be recycled to stop incipient violence in many cases... but then things calmed down remarkably fast.

The God of the Machine was whispering to them.

The Mekkers couldn’t keep Ronnie out of their systems, or her Curseline surging up the Levels behind her. Following their examples, many of the kids were mono-specializing post-Ten, and putting off the Rantha Levels in order to get the Ranks to operate at the highest Skill Levels. That did mean Expert or Melee for us, but that was usually enough to do the job we wanted to do, what with our Intellects being what they were.

It was weird to say that the Mekkers were getting religion, but they were basically a machine-loving cult as it was, and the pervasiveness of the influence was maddening the seniors who wanted to shut it down. It conflicted with many of their core beliefs, and actually supported working with organics as means to advance tech levels!

The waves of invention and innovation sweeping across the sector weren’t alien, weren’t blasphemous perversions of science... they were inspirations seeded by the God of the Machine, and they were everywhere an astropath could reach. TL 16 going on 17 coding was not something any living Mekker could deal with.

Ronnie hit Seventeen in a mental brainspike with nearly ten thousand post-Tens, Hagbloods and otherwise Leveling with her, an eruption of profound TL 17 coding language, ephemeral dimension-splitting Gate-opening calculations, digitizing death down into truly portable handguns, and hyperdimensional subshunting parallel particle physics for Tachyon Drives.

-------------

None of us had ever had a public Regression. I watched with everyone else as Ronnie reached into the Wall of preincarnation memory, and opened it wide.

There was a mental hum. Her Curseline was four thousand strong at this point, and every single one of their Curses lit up at the same time. Links and spikes through the Marks seemed to flow in every direction, and everyone gasped, millions of people, as suddenly we were bound up as we never had been before... and data was moving.

The God in the Machine was calling.

Boole and Quanta connections exploded, and Tek reached out into All The Systems. Across thousands of worlds, his awareness rippled out from Marked, Forsaken, and Psions, reaching levels of comprehension and awareness he had never been able to possess while a machine, and hooked into uncounted systems on wires made of thought and emotion as much as electricity and steel.

He found his naysayers, and purged them from the systems. I watched uncounted cyborgs get severed from the information network, and even from communion with their own systems. Many of them would die very quickly, indeed, screaming about the God in the Machine judging them, and finding them wanting...