Tellus was ringed by great solar harvesting arrays, transmitting vast amounts of power down to the planet day or night. Other than a few unfortunate times where thousand-year terrorist plans went off to disrupt the informed spread of vivus and they melted swathes through the ecumenopolis of the planet below, they were very reliable, well-maintained, and did their jobs.
They were also at TL 14. We had gotten some Marked into one of the maintenance crews, and simply swapped in some TL 16 components... which took up about a twentieth of the space, and worked even better, thus leaving us lots of room to put in some additional surprises, and feed those surprises with a lot of sunlight as the efficiency and conversion ratios went up another notch.
The satellites had no performance problems whatsoever, of course, and although they were turned off, the bombs inside definitely were not.
Nor were the bombs carefully set down right in the middle of the undead ‘hibernating’ in the necrodomes.
There were four Grimbright bombs, arranged in a four-sider pyramid around the planet, and when they went off, they were very, very bright, indeed.
Light is both a wave and a particle effect, and we had chosen to go more with the former when we designed these. Liquid, Radiant Light ignited in the void, brighter than all the suns and stars, and swept down across the world.
It got in anywhere that liquid could go through, instantly filling up any area it penetrated, washing across and through the face of the whole world.
It was 16d10 of undead-killing goodness, and they didn’t get a save.
The undead fleet rising from the depths of the former sands of the Sahara didn’t get very far before the Light flowed through the ship, and pretty much all the undead, and definitely all the incorporeals, were erased. The Death Furnaces all ignited with the traces of vivus carried by the Light, and the rising deathships halted, blazing with light and unwhite fire, and began to fall back down much faster than they had been rising.
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-He made a move on Titan.-
Anatolia’s /voice shifted my attention to observations of three deathships bombarding Titan and the Temple of the Silent Sisters with Blacklight. The temple’s shields were off-line, clearly sabotaged... the great soaring buildings with their windows would be no defense against the rays of death.
We were pretty much absolutely certain the Emperor had tried out the whole undead Brothers/Sisters thing at this point, and probably not been too pleased with the result. My guess was extremely short shelf life, if rather obscenely dangerous during that time period.
Alas for them, when they went down to investigate and harvest all the bodies, all they found were some white patches where the Imperial spies and toadies had been reduced en vivus.
They also found a Grimbright bomb going off there, fed for years by the light coming off Saturn, and bright enough to torch the three deathships in their orbital bombardment and send them spiraling into death plunges as they tried to engage their inertialess drive. They found it didn’t stop the semi-liquid Light from streaming through all the windows and cracks and passages in their ships as if alive and hunting them.
They fell blazing into the stormy bands of Saturn, alas, alas.
The Silent Sisters, old and young, watched the betrayal of the Emperor whose Empire their Order had supported so steadfastly for millennia, and that too became news spread across the galaxy.
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The Legions were especially shaken by the betrayal, as were the Umbrans. The Silent Sisters were psi and demon-hunters par excellence, with absolutely no political ambitions whatsoever, loyal to their cause to the death.
But there was no doubt the Silent Sisters would not have tolerated this undead blasphemy the Emperor was performing.
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“Blow the Palace.”
The only place the Grimbright Bombs hadn’t spread on Tellus was through the Imperial Palace, whose shields were actually capable of warding out the fluid Light that wanted to cover everything.
Its inhabitants got to watch the ships coming to reap the entire planet and turn them into faithful servants of the Empire, and then got to watch those dark ships and their loads of souls, and the undead marching forward to convert the living to unliving, burn in The Light.
It would have shaken the faith of any normal being, but the inhabitants of the Imperial Palace had long passed beyond the point of being able to question anything about their lord and master, and were nothing more than angry that the Emperor’s plans had been thwarted. Indeed, they were fully ready to offer their own bodies and souls to his service for eternity (more than likely just like their ancestors had), but the Reaping hadn’t even managed to reach them before it died.
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Now, security on Tellus was obscenely tight, as it was the only place in the Empire with active TL17+ tech. The sensors and divination stuff were awesomely good, and on top of that you had the Emperor right there on His Crystal Throne, time-scrying for threats to Himself, and stopping them before they could manifest.
It really sucked that the Nulls and Sources living around the bombs that we’d put in place didn’t have lived-lines extending into the future... or, at least, not ones you could notice, since they didn’t solidify until the present.
The bombs themselves were in fairly public areas, areas now abandoned as the populations had been warned of planetary bombardment and fled the areas around the Palace if at all possible. That was good, because the Omega Sanction of the planet could be undertaken from the Palace proper, which had all sorts of virus bombs in place and set up around old Tellus.
The G&G branches in the threat zone dimension-tightened the area, Rifts opened up, and they vacated with their families at great speed.
I could picture what happened as the last of them vanished through the Rifts, their Null influence with them, and the sealed area that had gracefully denied the scanners sensing the opening of dimensional apertures was suddenly gone, too.
All the Nulls and Sources making nothing much happen in the area were gone, which meant possibilities in time suddenly opened up. My guess is that the planet-cracker underneath the foundation of an armored warrior down in a causeway miles under the Palace -Captain Glohanas of the Storm Dogs, the Emperor’s crack troops from before he unified Tellus, long forgotten by anyone but the Emperor - was the first thing He sensed. I pictured a crystal skull whipping around as it sensed very bright annihilation coming from below, and instinctively reached out to stop it...
The psensors noted the incoming psi, and that planet-cracker, and the other twelve, detonated.
Now, we weren’t going to obliterate Tellus... although it was definitely on the table. For just a second a partial Rift was up around that planet-cracker, and the omni-directional blast instead went all in one precise direction, all directions ‘away’ from the Palace now opening up towards it.
It was a very intense blast, but the spatial bending was extremely localized, and had to last less than a second.
Ditto the other eleven.
Anti-uranium driven explosions blew up and out against the great mass of the Palace, fully capable of shearing through durasteel, plascrete, and the more exotic materials that made up the foundation and walls of the Palace.
Naturally its shields went up, already warm and waiting to be deployed after all the crazy stuff that had been going on. That was perfectly fine, as the blast simply melted everything outside their radius, and heaved the rest away.
To say we were totally unsurprised when the Bergenholm field kicked up over the Palace, and instead of being flattened and fused against its own shields it was instead hurled into space, was not inaccurate at all. The physics of magic space meant separating the Palace from the planet didn’t automatically set up a vacuum, and even if the planet was obliterated with a Core Bomb, the Palace would still survive without a problem. It could even move around using a simple tugboat.
Tracking down all those virus bomb dispensers had taken the kids tens of thousands of man-hours. Driving a bunch of hot plasma down into them was pretty gratifying, and like the planet-crackers, not obvious until the Forsaken left... and since they didn’t directly threaten the Palace, only stop the Omega Sanction, were even less likely to be psensed. Yeah, blowing atomics in population centers wasn’t fun, but these were designed to be very hot, very localized, and everybody was already sealed up in Bloks and Spires... losses were minimal, and many orders of magnitude below what they would have been if those viruses got out.
We’d already confirmed that the filter mechanisms of all the population habitats were compromised to those particular strains, and would have been fed right into the hundreds of billions of people within them. New updates were going out to the filter mechanisms even as plasma bombs eating virus bombs were going off around the planet, and the killing agents given a pass were wiped out of the datafiles.
We might not be able to save Tellus, but we’d done our best to save as many as we could.
Directing the force of the Mantle bombs straight into the Palace, and it taking the hit and bouncing out into space, actually spared the rest of the planet some very destructive earthquakes, as it took the seismic jolts with it when it suddenly went tumbling out past the moon and kept on going. As soon as the Bergenholm turned off, multiple 10-point earthquakes were going to rumble through the place from multiple vectors, and shatter it like porcelain, since the force didn’t have a planet to vent itself into.
Since everyone inside was basically already a Thrall to the Emperor, them dying wasn’t any big loss. The problem was that they would rapidly be coming back as undead. Mmm.
The Imperial Palace was bigger than a Starhome, if not at all properly configured for space combat. That being said, it was the size of Australia, so the sheer number of weapon emplacements and amount of power it could generate was a thing... except if it did any of that, it had to turn off the Bergenholm, or get batted around like a badminton ball from the recoils.
Importantly, there was no way the mechanism for the Celestial Beacon was going to survive what was coming. The systems were way too intricate and something was going to crack and break when all that seismic energy tried to vent.
Our spotters watched a few of the Imperial Fleet’s ships come in and establish tractor locks to stop the Palace from tumbling through space. While they were figuring out what to do about the seismic waves, a whole lot of video was downloaded to Booles and certain specific individuals, detailing exactly what had happened here, and how much of it had been foiled.
I didn’t have to say who was responsible. Something like ‘first confirmation of these filters non-active for Virus Agents X, Y, and Z was Year 884 Emperor’s Throne’ meant that they had been in place since the Blok was built. People weren’t idiots, and were quick to pick up on the patterns.
Also, this had occurred on Tellus and the Sol System. This wasn’t an attack by outsiders on the heart of the Empire. This was an attack by the heart of the Empire on itself!
Multiple fanatically loyal Imperial ships had abrupt Core Breaches that flooded their ships with lethal radiation. The truest and most faithful servants of the Emperor died screaming in ship after ship.
Then the deathships streaming necroic energy came close, and the dead got right back up, ignoring the radiation, and returned mindlessly to their tasks.
We sent out a polite inquiry to the Imperial Ships watching this across the Sector, wondering if they might not want us to purge the breaching command from their systems?...