Warp energies crackled against necroic offsets, gravity drives realigned as the Veil shuddered and snapped itself shut, the backwash of dimensional travel momentarily keeping space swimming with imbalances and disturbances that had to settle down.

The main technorganic mother ships looked like some version of flying centipedes, swollen and fat with their loads of invaders, with fungi-like white growths scattered over slick black carapace hides that were as strong as durasteel. Secondary ships looked like extended spiders, or slowly writhing squids, or maybe stellar snails, undulating in the void. Plasma currents radiated from the legs, and the scant hydrogen in the area was sucked towards the maws of the creatures even as their scales opened up to suck in the sunlight greedily.

The torpedoes were coming in right on the edge of the rapidly shrinking area of dimensional instability. Five, four, three, two, one...

They crossed a million miles of space, and the cerevore fleet realized what was there with literally no time to react to it, even psionically.

The sky lit up with megatomic warheads, anti-matter blasts, singularity ruptures, and binding force neutralizers going off to catastrophic effect. Gargantuan space beasts were torn open and apart before their defense fields and ablative energies could marshal to resist what was hitting them, and psychic screams of beasts as large as Spires radiated for AU’s through the mindscape.

“Blow the wrack.”

At Captain Tabitha’s order, secondary explosions popped up all over the place, like unstable matter being set off by the gargantuan forces of the incoming torpedoes, and faded away like dying fireflies.

A mesh of nanotech particles went out, drawn to centers of gravity and mass out here in the void. Their only purpose was to stick to the hides of these things and clearly indicate their positions when scanned by sensor waves in the appropriate frequency, making hiding and cloaking tactics nearly impossible. Waves of smaller craft were already being spit out of dozens of sphincters opening in each of the motherships, and the nanotech was splatting against them, along with all the flash-frozen blood, meat, and ash from the wounded ships all around, blending into the mess.

“Go to Jam,” Captain Tabitha pointed, and gravity drives sent them falling away and spinning, their engines flaring to life and catching the attention of the more photo-sensitive of the creatures a million miles away from them as they got free of the rock’s gravity well and went to Jamspeed. The enemy fleet shifted subtly to face them, and the whole of the Widow’s Bite shook as a massive wave of timeless, cold, uncaring hate swept over and past them, letting them know they had been seen and marked, and now they were being chased.

The invaders just had to get out of tactical range of one another first.

The size of the forces behind them was being uploaded into Markspace and promptly downloaded into the system-wide tactical displays, even faster than telepathic updates, and impossible to interfere with, as long as a Marked individual was there to provide the intelligence. At least two such individuals from the Goldilocks teams were working in the Signals department of every ship of the line in the system, which meant the Fleet Captains were being informed in real time better than they had ever been before.

The Rantha Protocols were being updated in real time, and orders were flying out.

------

Anatolia Rantha considered the positions of all the Fleet assets in the systems, judged them, juggled them, and began to plan.

Her Talent was War Gamer, and this grand tactical battlefield was where her Talent shone the brightest. The captains and admirals of the Fleet in the system would have been incensed if they knew their maneuvers were being decided by a woman sitting in the yoga position on floor 184 of a haunted blok, surrounded by thousands of ghosts very, very curious about the sheer profoundness of the psychic ripples swirling around her, rendering her a very, very important being for what was about to happen.

It was a big step up from RTS games in her prior life, which had consumed Anatoli Ryuivov so much he was basically a vidiot living on stims and games. Now, his Talent was being put to proper use in defense of reality, instead of fleeing from it.

Three dozen Ranthas and Briggs with warlord, command, or tactical-based Talents were linked to her and helping her with the load and decision making, while also turning broad decisions and judgements into real-time instructions and tactics, which the field commanders out there turned into local orders and execution. Music was humming through the whole mess, grand and solemn, building ever-so-slowly with a terrible killing momentum.

Tremble, ohhhh oh ohhhh, Tremble, we come...

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Captain Tiffany Rantha was in command of the newly commissioned Coronal ship, the Bared Saber. It was still a cruiser, as heavier vessels were the province of the Imperial Fleet, and the Coronals were more about speed and getting to places faster, in and out, than overbearing firepower.

Except for this ship, which was fully manned by both Forsaken and Beacon Psions eager and proud to serve the Coronal Knights. It had been totally redesigned to accommodate both Axiomatic and Holy Runeforms in both structure and emplacement, and even the crew that had worked on it and its components, assembling them all, had to be specially vetted by the Green and Gold. Rantha Shipyards wasn’t big, but it had some very exclusive customers...

The goal of the Coronal Knights was not to hide. It was to be out there and be seen, standing between threats to the human race and humanity, letting them know that the Coronal Knights were always going to be there.

If this time it was a Coronal Guard in charge, well, there were a lot more of them than Squires available to do the job.

Captain Tiffany Rantha was seated right on the Gravity Chair, the heart of the Gravity Drive that formed the foundation for every sublight propulsion system for basically every race known.

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Anti-gravity was a TL 9 invention, and once a society mastered it, they instantly also stumbled into the transphysics mess that was sublight travel in the Realm of the Warped.

The Realm of the Warp was still a magical realm, and outer space tended to act very differently in magical places. Oh, there was vacuum, and cold, and radiation... but the intersection of gravity and mass and the Veil formed some truly wonky relationships.

The first thing that happened is that any psychically charged object above a certain mass threshold had a gravity rating of 1, and could take and hold an atmosphere. It generated a gravity well of its own, and would interfere with the unlimited speed of objects around it.

As it turned out, Energized Elements were psychically active, and most celestial objects that endured a few millennia of direct hard rads mixed with Warp energies qualified. So, if you landed on the average comet or asteroid, it would have an atmosphere about equal to a standard planet’s in density, and one standard gravity, despite having nowhere near the mass for either of those things from a physics standpoint.

Planets could get HIGHER than 1 g, if they had sufficient heavy Energized elements. If they didn’t... even a massive hunk of rock the size of Jupiter would only have one standard gravity, making it possible to settle superworlds. High G worlds were thus naturally mining bonanzas.

Without living or psychically-charged accompaniment, objects moving faster than orbital speed shed their velocity rapidly, until they were moving at the same speed as all other objects on the same orbital track. So, firing a railgun off didn’t result in objects moving at a considerable fraction of the speed of light for infinity. Within one light-second of range, their velocity would bleed off to nothing more than orbital speed, and they would basically fall into a gravity well and sit there forever unless something hit them.

It also meant that ships that were shot or blown apart weren’t scattered over millions of miles of space. Bereft of psychic impetus, their momentum was bled off, their pieces would slow to a halt, and microgravity gradually pull them back together in a scattered mess of parts. Large battlefields eventually cleaned themselves up over decades into massive compressed hulks of rent ships cemented together, even moreso if they had enough residual energy to become Celestial objects again.

The crux of this was the gravity drive, and Jamming Speed.

When you exited the gravity well of other objects and were Flying Free, your ship’s gravity well condensed and instantly accelerated the ship and all within seamlessly to Jamming Speed, a weird mix of Veil bending and psychic energies wrapping around the ship as it accelerated to the speed of one hundred million miles per hour, or close to .15c!

This effect only occurred if a psychically empowered individual and a proper Gravity Chair was hooked into the gravity drive, somehow maintaining normal gravity on the ship even as it surged forwards at unbelievable speed.

Random objects below the gravity well threshold were simply bent around the ship, or cut right through by the velocity involved, as even the atmosphere around the ship was a blade at that speed.

Of course, while Jamming, the ship was moving unidirectionally. To redirect, it had to come out of Jam, reorient, and start up again. Thus, in order to change heading while Jamming, it was necessary to use some form of reaction drive to adjust course.

Naturally enough, everyone being at the same maximum limit of sublight speed was totally unacceptable to everybody involved, and the race for sublight drives that exceeded Gravity Jamming was one of the things that defined most races in the galaxy.

A motley combination of fusion drives, antimatter drives, solar sails, pressor fields, and similar things sprang up to add further impetus to sublight travel speeds. It was much less about acceleration than about harmonizing with the Jamming speed, and defying or sliding past the resistance of space as you moved. So, putting engines to full didn’t mean constant acceleration when Jamming, it meant hitting a threshold and staying on the edge of it as resistance from space piled up on you and tried to slow you back down to standard Jamming.

Constant ‘real’ acceleration might be able to eventually surpass Jamming speeds, but you’d have to endure without artificial gravity the whole time, and trying to dump the momentum would be catastrophic, as suddenly dropping to Jamming speed while moving that fast would rip the ship to shreds as you tried to slow down or speed up suddenly; the difference in acceleration would pulp everything aboard, inertial compensators or no.

Only inertialess drives would transition seamlessly between the two modes of travel, and almost nobody had the tech to do that but the Tekrons, and maybe the Harlique.

If you were in Fleet, your gravity wells had another name... Tactical Range!

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Captain Tiffany Rantha’s Talent was Captain of Her Ship. She was born to command a ship and its crew, and her Skill Ranks went into all aspects of her ship. It was a far cry from the society-climbing, party-indulging silks and dancing of her last life, and if she had a pink teddy bear and pillows in her quarters and pink hair, that was nobody’s business but hers.

Her psicrystal was plugged into the Saber, and effectively gave the ship a working AI. It was her Item Familiar, and her Sword Focus was punched into it, too. The full sum of her Rantha Matrix and Reserve was working the Gravitic Drives with the power of someone much higher Level. Her hair was plugged into every system in the ship, and she was singing with the Bared Saber as she drove him into position... because the Saber was definitely male, and was looking to be used!

There were two sets of crewmembers on board the Saber: those engaged in mundane handling of the ship’s equipment, and those unleashing psychic Nimbuses onto the weapons of the ship.

Different weapons required different amounts of Focus to empower, ranging from ten to a hundred or more, depending on what it was. Psychic circuits allocated that energy where it was needed, and the crews who were personally manning the weapons could also contribute their energy directly while working them!

Normally the ship’s helm would handle maneuvering, but Tiffany had maxed out her Piloting and Navigation Ranks, taking those Masteries and Skill Foci as her primary skillset, slaving the Primary Guns to her will, as well as monitoring the engines, power supply, and primary sensor feeds.

There were also crew seconded to all of those positions, tasked with observing things she didn’t have the time or focus to, bringing them to her attention via Mark, or collating data for analysis to send to her in the middle of the fight.

They had been through hundreds of simulations with her, against all sorts of opponents, often at murderous difficulty, and they had boundless confidence that their captain was the deadliest shipmaster in the whole fleet.

And this whole ship was her Sword!