He heard the calls in Markspace, and Serena’s smooth /voice came through to all her Marked, including him, -We have nuclear launches, the bloks will be sealed.-

He felt her eyes on him. She was out there, and she had been trying to get to him, and now wouldn’t be able to. Everybody who wanted to live was trying to find some sort of cover.

The great blast doors of the blok began to close. Windows were sealed, stairwells were shut. The enemy reinforcements flooding inside in a black tide were suddenly and abruptly cut off by hundreds of thousands of tons of duracrete reinforcement.

“My Queen, sir!” a young G&G ex-ganger by name of Timeos shouted out, his mindclaw out in one hand and mindshield blazing hope on the other. The pale lines of a Ghost Knight Claw followed his swipe as he ripped one Pslave’s head off with the flat of his hand, and then plunged it up under the chin of a second, taking the charge of two more on his Shield, and with a crackling flare of his Focus going off, blasted them back and over the side of the Plunge to join the rain and the hills of crushed dead heaping up below. “Any orders?”

Every single Rantha everywhere called him My Queen, as did the Briggs, and nobody else dared do otherwise. It gave him a not-quite unique status, as now every single Exterminatus Sanctius Branch Manager in Janus Prime was officially dubbed the same.

To the other managers, it was half-mockery. To Egil Rosenblaum, it was His Title, and nobody messed with it.

“Northwest Quadrant, two floors down,” he pointed, voice as bland and calm as ever, and people began to move in that direction with purpose, even as the cerevores lost their control and were scrambling to reclaim it.

He glanced over the side at the mounds of dead gathered in the atrium below... and all the slick black carapaces swarming over the biomatter.

He flicked his Arsenal over to Vivic, switched back to gyro, extended calmly and lucidly, and ripped off six shots from each gun.

Unwhite flames exploded on the fresh corpses, and might have blown apart a few of the scavenger syms that grew from unimplanted eggs.

The dead began to burn. No biomatter to scoop up and turn into more xenos...

He turned around and led the charge towards the nearest set of stairs that would stay open. Down would get him closer to that cerevore, and they had stairs to clear.

---

The ultrablast came screaming in, trying to blow apart his brain, and the brawny, shaven-head meat puppet leered at him as his skull pulsed and rippled unnaturally.

Egil was blasted back off his feet, slamming into one of the pillars next to the plunge, but he lost neither Focus nor his Guns.

The nega-psionic Feats weren’t restricted to Null Psis. Anyone who was not a psion could use them.

The rippling rings that had slammed into him seemed to impale themselves on invisible barbs, and shredded forcewaves flashed back as they did so. They slammed right into the meat puppet’s face, and he jerked pack, pale fluid jetting out his nose and around his eyeballs at the feedback.

Calmly and lucidly, Egil lifted both of his pistols and fired twice each.

The +VI virtua drilled through soft human facial bone, slammed into the stone-hard fungal body of the brain-rider, punched in, and banefire detonated. The first shots blew the puppet’s skull apart, and sent the cerevore flying. In midair, the second set of shots hit it again, and blew it apart like a frozen stone struck by two explosive, anathemic hammers. He vaguely heard some psquealing, but the Pstatic Ward made it illegible, for which he was blandly grateful.

He looked at the scattered bits as he got to his feet, and over the Plunge with a sigh, ignoring the several dozen blasted Pslave corpses around him, as did the G&G defenders with him as they finished the last of the infected off.

Black forms were climbing up the support beams.

-Everyone working the Plunge, we’ve got xenos climbers. The stair defense must be holding, and they are trying another approach. Sun shots, pick them off.-

He couldn’t do the same, but a gyro every three seconds had much the same result. Everyone who had a firearm (and those who didn’t grabbed one off the floor) came up to the guardrail, took aim, brought up a Nimbus, and began to shoot across at the upcoming xenos swarming up the walls.

His team shot across, another team two floors down did the same, each killing the other’s threats, action replicated by other squads and teams up and down the Plunge. Those up high who had cleared ground were leaning over the side and shooting down the length of the Plunge if they had the range, turning and running for the lower floors, or, in the case of those who were Fives, or actual psions, going right over the edge and coming down directly by hopping/sliding from floor to floor on lightfoot or psionic Drifting.

-Is the floor below clear,- he /inquired, backing up Lepido’s wary all-clear, who had jumped off his shoulders when he was hit, and zipped right back up there when he stood back up. Those Soul Feats adding to his Toughness and Soak had really saved his bacon...

Shooters across the way looked up, indicated that directly below him was good. He shoulder-holstered his guns, and swung over the side... followed by easily half the squad, while the rest pulled back to guard the nearest stairs and set up a killing cordon at the designated hard points, grabbing all the firearms off the dead Pslaves they could.

He dragged his hand, just enough control with lightfoot to let him fall, and catch the railing to the next floor without ripping off his arm. He grunted to nobody in particular as the much younger men around him did the same, and then dropped again to the next floor.

Looked like he only needed one hand. He drew Calm out and shot one of the bigger xenos only thirty stories below, let go, and fell to the next floor. Sun Shots blew past him, and the shooters on the other side who could do the same followed suit, while the rest moved to sweep the floor and secure the stairs.

In a rolling cascade, the G&G elites began to go over the edge and drop down. Those who weren’t shooting moved more quickly than those who were, so the top floors were catching up to the lower ones. The real lightfooters were coming down close to the pillars, kicking off from pillar to rail to pillar to rail, as if they were waltzing down stairs, descending towards the rising black tide.

-Hold and circle the Plunge at 40, line it up, and go down together,- he /ordered, and the falling teams began to shift and line themselves up accordingly. The ring of fire below him began to intensify, and xenos were exploding in acidic clouds. Occasionally the descenders dropped down in reach of some startled Pslaves who hadn’t been shot, and paused to mow them down impersonally.

The ring of fire began to build up, firing down into the teeth of the rising horde, and as floor after floor joined them, it only got more murderous.

Team after team of G&G hit Floor 40. The Pslaves hadn’t managed to get above 100, so the higher floors had been sending their people down to secure the stairs and make sure no one got up that high, corkscrewing down the blok and making sure each level was secure as they did so. They were coordinating with teams on the besieged levels, while their elites plunged down to join My Queen on the attack.

Egil looked around at the hundreds of guns now lined up and picking off the nearest xenos ten floors down. There were no ranged attacks of note coming up from below, as the smaller sym dart-shooters couldn’t climb and shoot at the same time, and the humans were way above their launch range.

-One floor at a time. The xenos are on 30. Clear the Plunge and one floor at a time.- He glanced at the hardpoints set up every other floor in the besieged zones. The lower floors were empty and abandoned, anyone alive down there was a miracle in hiding. Happily, the Pstatic Ward had destroyed the attackers’ coordination, so they actually had a chance if they could kill anything that found them. Regrettably, the swarming xenos coming in were good trackers and would mass-swarm anything they fought, so those people didn’t have much of a chance.

But still, mental hands went out to hold them, to recognize them, and to be beside them as they died, taking away the fear and replacing it with Kill Just One More.

They would all be Remembered!

--

Lepido, perched up on Egil’s shoulder, spread her butterfly wings and looked left as they approached the corridor junction. Egil stopped, and everyone looked to the left side with the fluttercat, guns snapping up.

The syms came pouring around the corner in a stream, claws and organic dart-launchers raised.

-One two three one two three one two three...- Egil /counted off amid the singing in their minds, and the volleys were staggered with computer-like precision as the swarm of syms was shredded with amazing speed. Mindshields in front clenched and crackled as the living missiles and their toxic loads bounced off them and fried, twisting and cooking as they hit the ground.

A true xeno leapt for them, springing through the air like a great black-carapaced hunting insect-cat. Lucid took it in midair, blowing acidic brains all over the place to douse those in the front line. Lepido stayed very close to him as the corrosive sludge slid down Egil and his Vajra, doing no more harm than water, ate away the decades-old perma-plas carpet instantly, and turned the plascrete below into cratered sludge.

At Five it was mandatory to have Acid in your Vajra Resistance, because that’s when you could go outside the walls. Nobody with Egil was less than a Five, so they didn’t have to fear exploding xenos blood, despite the Throne-awful mess it was making of their surroundings.

Someone shot it vivic, and the acidic blood was like oil to the unwhite stuff. It spread rapidly among the dozens of dead syms they trod over, careful of pokey bits, set it all to burning, and really put a thrumming into the Pstatic Ward.

The psions with them were mostly relegated to support and healing, since they were outnumbered by the cerevores and no match for them in general. The Nulls and Sources following Egil, on the other hand, didn’t really give a shit for the cerevores at all, only how difficult they were to kill once they found them.

Random civilians who couldn’t make it to the hard points were pretty much all dead before the teams got to 20. They didn’t have time to make a hard sweep and scan of every little nook and cranny, despite knowing they were going to miss people. That was fine, as the secondary teams coming down from the higher floors as they brutally cleared the main threats out of each one would perform mop-up, with the Ghost Knights leading the way.

The pslaves and the syms could be tricky and sly, but they couldn’t escape the vengeful eyes of the dead of Habberblok, who were all completely incensed at what was happening, and the new undead being created just like they had been.

There were going to be a lot of angry dead in Janus Prime after this battle...

They’d felt the floor shake more than a few times, and knew atomics had gone off in the distance. When the main power lines were cut and the lights went out, nobody much cared, as portable lights and some back-ups went on, Focus or Soul Feats made sure everyone could still see, and the killing continued.

From the perspective of the cerevores, what was happening was a zone of cold, terrible psilence they couldn’t see past was pressing down from above, as Nulls and Sources came down to greet them and their minions, with no detectable thoughts or emotions for them to pick and prey on.

The higher floors and the prey there seemed to vanish, and a dire, solemn, and heavy mental weight was pressing down on the aliens remorselessly!

Worse, trying to take over the mind of one of the pesky humans meant they needed line of sight, and it was uncanny how much fire they instantly attracted when they attempted a takeover. Egil and Lepido were more vulnerable than the Null kids, but the kids had their Nulls up and out, and were generally screening for the two of them. Any successful domination attempt was promptly dealt with by those closest to the person Focusing their Nulls into the head of the afflicted and breaking the connection almost instantly, if a hundred voices shouting into their heads couldn’t do the job.