-Not interrupting anything, I hope?- Anatolia /butted in on the conversational channel.
I tunked a mug of Blue Ribbon with Mah Fuzzy, and we both took a drink, fed her the impression. She gurgled at the mélange of horridly overpowered sensory impressions going through, and then looked around the room with me at four Ruk Kings, sitting there sleeping with their mugs still in hand, maybe drooling into their beards a little.
-King Rargyle juiced his Fort Save to the moon, and managed to walk back to his own creche before he passed out,- I /relayed to her, tunking with Briggs again. -Pabst did good. I understand he’s got some of their brewmeisters calling him up, wondering what the fudge he did to his beer.-
-Circumstance bonus to Diplomacy check, +10,- she /acknowledged, while also making a note to get a keg of the stuff for herself. It was designed to get us drunk, if we let it, so saying it was potent was like saying cobra venom was watery. Pabst and his bros and their girls were forerunners in the Rantha drive for Edible Alchemy, and given a galaxy worth of exotic foods, they had been compiling, trying out, and upgrading basically infinite recipes and cuisines absolutely delightfully for the past hundred years or so.
The Weiser Brothers and Crocker Sisters were very, very well-known in certain circles, indeed, as Bud and Betty were happy to tell me...
-Just cycling in to say the Princes are moving ahead,- she /informed us.
Briggs and I shared a glance.
-They’ve written off the Abyss as a lost cause,- Briggs /mused. -They’ll be pulling out whatever assets they can and throwing them at the Emperor to hurry stuff along, rather than losing them against the Sector Fleets grinding each system down, one by one. Well done, Ana.-
She /glowed, broadcasting it to the Strategos, who it was all aimed at. The moves they were making on the Warp Worlds were making it murderously plain that the Warped couldn’t defend their worlds successfully. They were now on the receiving end of the kinds of mass raids and crusades they had enjoyed inflicting on Imperial Worlds, only now the full weight of humanity was pressing down on them.
The seething need for revenge was boiling on everything from Shrineworlds to the God of the Machine, to Forgeworlds punching out vivic ammunition, to agriworlds and megacities churning out products and bodies to fight.
The Emperor might be able to be more absolutely efficient in labor since He had to provide nothing to the walking corpses working for Him, but the sheer scale of production we now had control over, that should have been His, was not something the Warped had any chance of equaling.
And of course, Vakker-tech, Beacontech, and Angeltech were all very, very resistant to Warp and general psychic shenanigans, and the upgrades in material, worker skill, and Tech Level was not something they could adapt to short of engaging ever more Warp Sorcery... which was also starting to have difficulties with ever more Nulls and Sources permeating the ships with White Fields that eroded all that nasty magic away...
Our Null and Source Circuit Pit Engineers rocked.
If they could truly unite under a supreme commander, the Warped could make a go of it, the same way a Subsector in rebellion might. Unfortunately, it was now they who were on the end of the Empire’s wrath, not some deluded people hoodwinked by Warpsie shenanigans, and there was an absolute lack of any reluctance to kill them whatsoever.
This wasn’t some demon-ascendant warpling’s pet project, and it was coming on the tail of a catastrophic cracking of the power of the Warp Gods, so morale wasn’t the best, either. All the wildly independent and rival forces might have a common enemy, but that didn’t mean they were going to rush to help one another.
The ones who COULD have united them? They had doubled down on their vengeance to destroy the Emperor, confident that in time all things would come back to them. If they had to wait another five thousand years to take back what was rightfully theirs, so what?
Of course, our view was a little different. This time, they didn’t have a pet galactic zit to run off to, where they could hide and nurse their little psychoses into full power barminess.
The zit had been popped. Now it was just cleaning up the pus.
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We didn’t attempt to interfere with what was going on with them and the Emperor. Our pressure on the Warped Worlds actually inspired system fleet after fleet to give up and flee elsewhere.
Sometimes it was to allied worlds, who would soon inherit their own problems, and the Omega Sanctions painting their worlds white.
Some would flee off to who knew where, trying for the unexplored Fringe and whatever might be hiding out there. If they knew the extent to which we’d mapped the Fringe, they might not have gone that way, but in any event, scouts were cheap and not at all unskilled at tracking them. The Elvar particularly liked the mindset of tracking and choosing the moment to strike, so they took care of many of the runners.
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The rest headed off to reinforce the Demon Princes, specifically including any ‘independent’ Fallen Legions that had remained behind to secure their worlds. They abandoned their Marshal Worlds and systems to their fates without a care, and so the forces of the Demon Princes started growing in might faster than the Emperor could make new ships.
It was a good move by the Warped, as when a flotilla of Deathships arrived in the Warped Worlds and began to Deathlight hapless worlds, nothing without extreme orbital defenses could endure it.
Unlike normal planets, no attempt was made to Animate the dead, which the Warp would definitely have enjoyed making use of. Indeed, the Emperor watched two worlds get spontaneously reanimated by Riggibuhl, and decided that letting the Corunsuns and rest of the living humans deal with them was a great diversion for us.
We followed His ships in, followed them back out to one of His more advanced Forgeworlds, and Sunburst it. He probably wasn’t amused at our cheekiness, especially with the way we were burning away all those worlds He’d slaughtered and their usable dead populations, but He only had Himself to blame.
He left the annihilation of the Warp Worlds to us mere secondary powers, and concentrated on His defense against his murderous sons.
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-What are we looking at here?- I /inquired of Anatolia, as The Map of Gloom, ever slowly moving and steadily and slowly being filled in and updated, rotated between us in Markspace.
-Mass movements of undead labor through Gloom to his primary fortress worlds, along with goods. He’s calculating what worlds we’re going to take out first, and taking everything He can off them before we wipe them.-
He’d arranged for Portals large enough for anti-grav haulers to get through, along with starfighter escorts to make sure they got where they needed to. The drow were quick to begin raids on them, but the number of undead streaming in through thousands of Portals was literally not something they could deal with easily.
Shadowknives could get scarily close to the undead without difficulty. Munition transports, vehicles of war... and those over there were Mechanist crates for transporting machine goods, and others for transporting E-elements smelted and refined in the furnaces of a thousand worlds.
-He’s moving his production lines, too,- Briggs /nodded. -He can still flood Gloom with basically unlimited bodies, right up until the worlds are wiped. He’s given up invading our worlds, but he’s turned Gloom into a transport network to increase His production. We took away his Purgeworlds via the Gardeners, but His system defenses are too high to do the same for the Imperial Systems.-
-So, we have to hit him on Gloom with armies.- I cracked my knuckles. -I see he has Mirror Shields for light-based attacks. We’ll have to go back to kinetics. I didn’t see any sign of portable Blacklights yet-?-
-He does have artillery-level versions of them,- Anatolia /pointed out, bringing in another observation scene of a remarkably skeletal-looking piece of hardware. -Perfect for wiping a battalion at a time, or something.-
Fighting an inhumanly powerful, damage-resistant, perfectly obedient force of uncounted millions in an alien realm, armed with weapons that could mass wipe living beings...
With no supply problems on His end, and a fortified deploy point and planetary populations and production behind that one place, they would have endless reinforcements, and could tie up massive amounts of troops on our end...
I eyed the undead, fully-cybered soldiers defending the Portal to Gimril II in the Markspace. They were probably only Threes, but cybered up enough to rival any Sixes, with the larger models improving even more.
It wasn’t an army any mortal force really wanted to fight.
On the other hand, we had plenty of time to get undead cyborg specialist killers in place. It was really all the support hardware and the fortified position that was going to be the hardest to deal with.
I wasn’t going to get into an artillery duel with the Emperor, or start siege battles at a thousand Portals. That was just insane, something the Warped would do with great enthusiasm... and use unlimited amounts of demons as literal cannon fodder support in doing so.
I wasn’t Warped. I definitely did not want to face Him on anything resembling the terms He wanted us to. A war of attrition was all on His side, and could only be overcome by overwhelming firepower... which was totally possible, but was not something we wanted to unleash on Him yet...
-Brother Compos, has Gloom’s tendency to make pathways, tunnels, and caves to active Portals changed at all?- I /asked a specific short fellow on Gloom, who might have been enjoying some relevant peace and quiet in Colby’s arms... well, relatively speaking.
-Ahhh...- He seemed a bit distracted for some reason. -No, it still likes to bury them or raise hills about them...-
-Can you encourage such things to happen?- I /went on. He had multiple thoughtstreams, put them to use, lad...
-Possibly?- he /answered. -We don’t really ask such things...-
-But your bonded psion joining in there certainly could, right?-
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Funny things about open Portals sitting there is that you can’t really have Interdictions up around them. Oh, you can try disrupting all the dimensional links except the big active one you have, but that just means the other party has to try harmonizing with it, and then you are amazingly vulnerable.
That becomes important for, say, escaping from the hundred-mile blast radius of an antimatter weapon going off a hundred feet or so beneath an active Portal after walking along a ten-mile capillary system opened up by Gloom towards this active Portal, extending right into the heart of the defenses around it.
We didn’t even do any fighting. We broke into the basements of the base inside its Mirrored Shield, where a few thousand undead were waiting there in silent, still obedience, and slowly turned to look as the wall melted in front of us.
There were a few seconds of shooting and flying metal-clad bones to clear out some room, and Kringle Briggs in his red and white power armor put down his big red sack and the gift inside it grew up nice and shiny for the undead to admire.
Then their Swords and Hammers whisked the quartet away, and two seconds later, the bomb went off...
Mr, Mr. Kringle, with a tingle and a jingle, has started on his merry day...
Bringing all them undead boyz, a Masspack full of xplodey toyz...