All over Janus Prime, a massive surge of viruses that were going out on the TC control systems were stopped simply by the whole system shutting down instantly.

Hover vehicles bleeped as suddenly they were on their own guidance systems. Drivers grabbed ahold of the controls in a panic, and the first accidents happened even as the systems in the cars blared for emergency descent, and secondary, sealed broadcast stations sent out short, sharp instructions.

Vehicle garages and parking spaces all over Janus Prime blared for attention, and flying vehicles made for them in a panic, trying to get out of the air as the traffic began to come unglued.

On the highways and groundways, the first overreacting drivers swerved and braked, and were promptly slammed into by those behind. Metals screamed, impact plastics buckled, and motorized vehicles went flying, the impacts enough to send them into the dump lanes and sometimes right over the edge of the arching motorways and into a long, long, fatal fall below.

The cargo haulers on their many routes began to slow, coming to rest in mandated stopways and tunnels, incidentally blocking those from use by other forces. The subway systems rolled to stops in the middle of routes, and their systems shut down.

Some hovercars that couldn’t find places to land descended right down from the sky onto any clear spot they could find, soon littering plazas and groundwalks with expensive fliers and those seated in them, often in areas where it was highly advisable not to do such things.

And while there were opportunists everywhere, just seeing so many vehicles coming down from the skies, both tumbling crazily and in control, did give pause to a whole bunch of people who would normally be engaging in lethal entrepreneurism.

The Boole crashed in a freak-out of spasming electronics that killed a million heavy cyberheads straight off, and every major media center was torn apart from carefully planted viruses and even actual explosions.

Except the Quanta, although they did try.

The coding attack was vicious and direct, and uncounted numbers of servers and those connected to them were flatlined in the first minute it spread. Then it ran into the servers running on Vakker-tech and the non-standard code support, and the firewalls came down on them and ate them.

Ranthas had no compunctions against using Black programming in the right situations, and the codings that went back out in return carried with them far more power than AMT circuits were meant to handle. The cyber-runners on the other side got to experience the joy of their own chrome melting in their heads.

The shooting was already under way as the Quanta spread the word as best it could among the underground hacking community, the Mekkers were reeling and trying to fight the massive viral attack on their systems, and a significant portion of the population turned on those beside them and began to kill them.

Massive psionic assaults gathered and ripped into the defenses of the Mentat headquarters... and unfortunately found the shields of the facility up, as were those of the Dungeon and the Castle. Sudden atomic strikes roared and swept away nearby zones and unsealed Bloks, but those Spires stood.

-----

Colby Rantha swore at what was boiling up out of the depths. Gleaming black carapaces, long tails, too many legs, slavering jaws, and the ripple of inhuman telepathy that said there were riders under the spinal crests directing the horde streaming towards the surface.

Without much ado, she turned tail and booked off considerably faster than even xenosyms could move, and sent out the alarm in Markspace that Aberrants were coming up from the lowest tunnels in great numbers all over the place, and that meant huge numbers of the Underspire population were either in danger or had been compromised!

That meant she was going to have a very entertaining time getting up and out of danger... and then an even more entertaining time making her way back down and giving these creatures the business!

------

“Slaver virus, transmitted by physical contact, primarily sexual!” the Umbran analyst called out, and Bluma Rantha sent word out on Marktell to everyone, along with Jensa’s analysis of the change in skin condition and oils that went with the rewritten DNA. Genetic scanners hooked into Band downloads from the Mark instantly updated the codes to scan for purity, while some slavishly fast coding was pumped out for optical sensors to look for signs.

----

Some nasty, nasty shit was coming up from below, even as elements of the Juris and the Guard rebelled and began to shoot their compatriots, totally fucking up the command structure of the military that was supposed to be reacting to this. That was only further messed up by various corpsec units going rogue and starting massacres of self-defense forces, and at least one minor noble house seizing the moment to raid and assault a long-time rival in best opportunistic fashion.

Six missile silos were compromised in Janus Prime, and many, many more in other cities. Nuclear fire fell from the skies as bloks screamed and locked down. Those unfortunate enough to be outside basically had little recourse as death fell from the skies, and millions died in the burning explosions that followed.

And then, with a crack and lash through the brains of every sentient creature in the cities, the Brainwards went live, and telepathic communication, the waves of panic and dread assaulting all the people of the city, and notably the mental communication of the alien invaders, was not Interdicted, but accompanied by stabbing psionic pain that rapidly crippled anything trying to talk, command, or influence by telepathic means. The greater the effort, be it in width or intensity, the greater the feedback.

And then, things started to change.

---------

Admiral Ontiff watched the data flashing across his screen, being downloaded from the planetary tactical feed somehow. He could see battlezones in every city on the planet, and most of the mining zones. Things were coming out of the ground all over the place, civilians were dying in massive numbers, and the command hierarchy was convulsing.

Orders coming in under the Twilight Seal of the Sun and Moon combined, however, were not something to be ignored in the best of times, let alone in the worst.

As such, the orders issued under the authority of the Dukes Twilight were crisp and clear, and when the suborned atomic weapons were fired off, at least the ones aimed at the other cities were immediately shot down by the planetary defensive satellites waiting for them. Hundreds of detonations painted an already overactive atmospheric soup with hard radiation and the fire of smashing atoms, and he could only grit his teeth and watch.

He was an admiral, and well understood that shooting off the missiles wasn’t just to attack the other cities. It was using up assets that could be used to defend against an invader!

The Rantha Protocols were updating, even as his own Signals department was trying to establish contact with ground forces and facilitate some form of official order.

Blinking, blinking, downloading...

[Incoming Invasion Fleet arrival within twelve hours 97% probable.]

He stared at the message, feeling a weird mix of exultation and grinding horror in his belly. It was the most desired, and yet the most feared kind of message any military man would want to see in their careers. Especially a Station commander of orbital assets, not even on the bridge of something that could fly away, maneuver, strike, and fade.

No, Space Station Threshold’s purpose was to sit here and take the assault, and give it back with everything they had. That the enemy could be effectively endless in number, while orbital assets were intrinsically limited, meant that his job was either remarkably peaceful for the tenure, or ended with obliteration. Orbital stations, regardless of their power, simply could not hold in the end.

The Protocols updated with orders for him again. Early launch coordinates?

He went over the idea, and found nothing wrong with it. The sad fact was that the stations might not even be able to launch all their firepower before they were attacked and overwhelmed by the numbers of ships incoming. If they had firepower already launched and waiting for final coordinates...

“Torpedo crews, prepare to fire payloads!” he called out, sending out the coordinates and firing instructions to the crews, who, even if there was no enemy on their sensors to shoot at, were too disciplined to question, and rapidly began the chain-firing of the largest defense weapons of the station.

----------

Fully cloaked in the newest Umbran and Coronal strike cruisers respectively, Captains Tabitha and Tiffany Rantha waited calmly on opposite sides of the system, passive sensors out, space wrack deployed here and there with surprises aboard, clinging to the sides of slowly tumbling asteroids.

The points they were waiting at were nearest the constantly fluctuating confluence of gravity waves of the celestial bodies of the system, the weakest early penetration points that could be entered by Necrojump drives. They knew their opponents were cerevores, they knew they used those drive types, so it only remained to see where they would come in.

The ‘vores used technorganic vessels, who should feel their way to the weakest point in the overlapping gravity fields, yet outside actual planetary wells and magnetospheres. Calculating those points was an ongoing event that was generating a lot of heat in vakker circuits.

There had been no calculation over where or if a fleet could arrive psionically. There was only ‘when’. There was a lot of temporal obfuscation being thrown out, but the explosion of violence on Janus III had turned that divinatory mess into an explosive knotted mess that was impossible to fully conceal anymore, too many possibilities being thrown out in the chaos of combat to hide what was going to happen.

97% was good enough.

“Incoming torpedoes on glide coming in, Captain,” the sensor crew called out unnecessarily, as the data fed into the holosphere visible in the center of the chamber, and more importantly, Tabitha’s internal display.

“Steady.” Their job wasn’t to fight here. Umbrans didn’t engage in ship to ship combat unless they had to, that was Fleet’s job. Umbrans were there to deliver lethal blows... and set up even more lethal blows later.

The mental clock counted down. There was a plus-or-minus ten-second error to the divinations, which was largely based around twentieth-place variations in gravity coming off the sun’s internal combustion, which couldn’t be absolutely calculated. When dealing with millions of cubic miles of space, that was highly relevant.

“Approaching mark. Ten, nine, eight...” droned the dry, unflappable voice of Corsty Bowlers, who three years ago had been killing gangers with the G&G Goldilocks team, and now was the voice of the Widow’s Bite, voice as practiced and calm as a lake.

“Mark zero. Mark plus one. Plus two. Plus three...”

Space wretched and vomited. Necroic black-green fires ate through space, and the fickle fires of the Warp, being eaten and devoured by death, bled through the Veil, and backlit the ships that were popping into existence like pus from zits expelled from the Warp.

“Paint them and maser their coordinates. Fire.”

The incoming torpedoes on glide-paths received their attack instructions, and burned to full life instantly.