“Admiral Ontif, this is Captain Melvin of the Pride. Sir, we are operating dark under Umbran directives to resupply and bring the reserve fleet out of mothball. I believe with the Rantha Directives being go, we should be in the clear now? Yes, confirmed, sir,” that splendidly deep voice came over the coms. “Initiating history transfer, sir!”

Admiral Ontif stared as the files were transferred over to his command station under encrypted Twilight Seal. With a measure of outrage and resignation, he opened them up, watching as ship after ship began to light up on the Sleeping Arm, their Captains declaring their readiness, while all of Threshold Station began to gape.

Resupply requisitions, crew assignments and transfers, timetables and schedules... it was all there, and all undertaken under his nose, without the slightest idea it was all happening. The volume of men and materials was staggering, and yet somehow it had all been done smoothly, without making any waves, anywhere.

The Captains were basically fresh out of the Academy here, and technically shouldn’t even have been given their positions. That had been accomplished by Coronal approval of their promotions and Umbrans discretely removing them from the rolls, so that there would be no protests or leakage of information from eager officers thirsty for command of their own vessels.

But... Admiral Ontiff stared at the lines of ships coming to life, the sure and steady voices of their captains sounding off, still not quite believing it.

Where did they find their crews? There were over a hundred mothballed ships out there, with crews no less than a thousand on each one of them! Those weren’t something you could just spin out of nowhere, grabbing men off the street and throwing them into place. They had to be trained and disciplined, and they had to learn the finicky nature of the vessels they were serving aboard!

He found his skin crawling despite himself at the unknown depths of the Order of the Fallen Moon. Somehow, they had arranged this... more importantly, they had known it would be necessary!...

He had been from one end of the Sector to the other, traveled to other Sectors on delegations and visits, and even been to far and grandiose Tellus once. Yet he suddenly found himself feeling flustered and small in face of the movement of great powers that he had not even been able to see in front of him...

-------

It certainly looked like legerdemain, but it actually really wasn’t all that hard, mostly because nobody wanted to guard ghostly old ships sitting in dock, waiting to be scrapped or called to a final fight once more.

So, reassigning the guards to Marked people who kept their mouths shut wasn’t hard. Getting a few people into Threshold Station Control and assigned to the boring duty of watching over scores of mothballed ships was likewise not very difficult. With those two things done, keeping resupply of the ships quiet was rather simple, and easily credited to other ships as munitions and manpower were moved aboard from terrestrial armories also staffed by Marked with writs of requisition from the Twilight Orders to get these ships ready for battle!

As for the crews, they had almost literally grabbed people off the street.

Marks were the greatest teaching tool any of them knew, capable of raising the Intellect of a recipient incredibly, while also directly teaching them new skills straight off the Akasha. Janus Prime’s population of billions meant there was still basically an unlimited labor pool, and the number of volunteers Rantha Corp and the G&G could attract had never really decreased. As soon as word came they were recruiting more, their servers were deluged with people wanting positions. Even if it involved military duty, the number of volunteers didn’t stop. The Planetary Guard could only wish for such enthusiasm!

A thousand Ranthas could train a ten-thousand-man crew for a heavy cruiser in half an hour. Profession (Spacer) with minor skills in things like fire control, munitions, maintenance, cooking, and other jobs of naval personnel basically taught all of them the basics of what was required. Specialist training in Engineering, Fire Control, Piloting, Navigation, and similar things could be assigned to people with complementary skills in people management.

The Marks allowed massive real-time training and discipline, assured loyalty, and enabled incredible coordination and teamwork. As the people poured Karma into the Marks, they only got smarter, and learned more skills!

Most importantly, they allowed instant acclimatization towards the ship of the new crewman, because they were all Marked on the ship they were going to serve on, and the akashic echoes of their training were matched to the self-same ship.

The crews felt like they had gone through extended training on whatever ship they were serving on as a result. All the little foibles and attitudes of the systems, and the spirit of the ship bound up in the psychic remnants of the past crews, just washed into and through them, like they’d always served there, and it was time to bring the ships back.

Thus, the penalty for acclimatizing to an old and forgotten vessel awash with psychic echoes of the past wasn’t a thing. This was basically a custom crew for each vessel, the only thing they were lacking was battle experience!

Vakker and Rantha-tech production had soared over the last year as more Ranthas came online and recruited more workers. There was more demand than product, and if Rantha-tech was being snaffled up by the Twilight Orders as fast as it could be made, well, Vakker-tech was still better than AMT at resisting psychic influences, of which there was going to be a bunch. And if you can customize your crews, you can also customize your upgraders, too!

Applying Holy runework was a non-starter, as the hull designs were Axiomatic, and so the protection was ineffectual... and not incidentally meant there was almost no exterior work to do that would be spotted. Certain key areas that could be reconfigured hastily could be Warded, and quickly were, but in the end, it was going to be the resolve of the crew and the ships they were in that would protect them.

Only a fraction of the captains were Ranthas or Briggs, although there were at least a couple on every ship, maintaining a Markspace and bringing an unreal level of competency to key areas. Talent assessment meant the Talented got the roles, and would grow into them, and the Hags and Hagspawn were available as back-up in case they were needed.

--------

It took two hours for the reserve fleet to disengage from their moorings, and head out into the stars. With all other Fleet assets in the system, they were still outnumbered by the bioships of the enemy more than three to one.

But, the fleets of the enemy were split at the moment, converging on Janus III from separate vectors, while the Imperial Fleet was converging on the invading bioships that had been blooded already.

As for the others that made the mistake of chasing the Widow’s Bite, well, after seeing the results of the first torpedo volleys, the Threshold Stations around Janus were more than happy to contribute a few more to sneak attacks, while basically all the stealth and long-range assets of the Fleet were sniping off escorts and fighter-level bioships with alacrity, providing cover and coordination for incoming torpedoes operating at maximum velocity... and more than a few cloaked Wrack Mines planted in the path of the incoming bioships.

Although vastly outnumbering the defenders, the incoming bioships had no recourse but to slow down and sweep the area, while scissoring snipers and torpedoes coming in at high c fractions struck with remarkable coordination, despite the electromagnetic and psychic static fritzing all standard means of communication. The fast fighter-level escorts swooping in to surround and pick off the picket ships ran into gathered and overlapping firezones of some remarkably effective point defenses repeatedly... and multiple wings of screening starfighters eager to add to kill tallies begun flying prop-jobs in the Warp Zone.

The Xeno-Vore Invasion of Janus III was fully underway, and there was war in the void.

=============

And while all that exciting stuff is happening elsewhere...

“Vamp Veiling was definitely a good idea, fuzzy,” I mused, as we glided across the blasted and fused landscape around the ship.

Although we were eager, we still did things properly, circumnavigating the entire area of the crash site, just at the edge of the danger zone, plotting it all out and fixing its position.

To really do this right, we should head on out the other side, and fight our way clear to the opposite end of the Warp Zone. Maybe we might do that, but not right now, as the fighting in the Warp Zone had been largely curtailed, and most of the troops withdrawn back to their cities even as shit hit the fan.

Most of the troops. Some could only stand and receive reports as the invasion from below and insurrection of suborned cities rose up and bathed their homelands in blood. Only a very small tithe of people managed to get away. The rest were holed up in bloks and Spires slowly getting cracked open, or were the ones cracking them open. There was basically no one in the middle, unless you counted the ones being eaten so mass xenosym reproduction could occur.

Converting humans to xenosyms 1:1, very efficient process of reproduction. The only exceptions would be those taken as slaves by the cerevores, either to power the necrodrives or for meat suits.

The kids were all over it. Those with Talents were better than I was at their specialties if they were Tens, so in terms of skills, I wasn’t worried about anything. The only real edge I had on them was in personal combat, and there was a war going on. It wasn’t going to be decided by Briggs and I having +3 per die in HP and +5 TH/Damage in a fight.

We found the backtrail of the colony ship, where it had skimmed in red hot, plowing a red-hot path across the ground... a ground that showed signs of insect skeletons and micro-organisms, plants and some higher lifeforms that no longer existed, crushed and burned to ash, but yet once part of the planet’s life.

Definitely not phrenics adapted to an alkaline world.

The hills of the chasm it had carved out while landing had smoothed down in the winds and sand, but were still a path.

Notably, at the edge of our range, we could see the fused remnants of xenosyms, burned down and flattened against the rock, shadows of them forever seared into the stone by a whole lot of plasma. It extended everywhere around the ship, not a square yard didn’t have the remnant of a xenosym body.

They’d still gotten out, somehow. Maybe only a fraction had escaped, but a fraction was all they’d needed.

Once circumlocuted, we went in.

My instincts had my hair standing up, which when it’s as long as mine is something I had to Compress down so it wouldn’t look too ridiculous. I wasn’t afraid, per se, but I was aware that we were within range of something with fantastic firepower, and even with Fire immunity, I didn’t want to test the impact of that much hot plasma... especially if it came from multiple sources.

The schematics we’d found and managed to strip and reform had given a basic design and layout, and hopefully there’d be basic maps in locations around the ship. The whole thing was shaped like a bullet, with bulges here and there of weapon emplacements, exits and entrances, antennae, shield towers, and the like. Overall, it had pretty clean lines, definitely not AMT, and still remarkably intact since falling out of the sky at least seven thousand years ago... given that it came about before the Emperor rose.

“There.” Briggs pointed, having an artistic eye, and spotting a way in before I did. I was paying more attention to the unending numbers of dead ‘syms below me, and trying to calculate population density.

A dark shadow near the buried foundation of the ship, gaping open, just about where another access hatch should be. Given its size, it was probably a couple hundred feet wide...