All that telepathy was winging down into the deeps of the alkaline seas. Far be it from me not to be the curious kitten and see where it was all going to and coming from. While I could understand Aklo, the thoughts of the cerevores were totally illegible without them trying to make themselves understood, completely alien on many levels.

That was okay. Although they didn’t have many emotions, the ones they did were coming through just fine. Puzzlement, fear, confusion, anger, irritation, annoyance, exasperation, disgust, disdain, scorn, belittlement... no, no, there was no blame game going on at all, was there? Hah!

I was shooting through the depths of the seas, and going deeper into the oceans at over 100 mph, while I tracked my location and pasted it to the Map, matching it up against routine sounding scans of the sea floor to verify where I was There were some interested and very big guns following my progress as I did so.

I couldn’t kill the aquasyms I came across, which was really irritating, as the very alert ‘vore riders would certainly send out an alarm before I could silence them... or simply not call back when telepathically pinged. As they really didn’t need to know I was coming, all the increasing incidence of massive aquatic beasts assimilated and enslaved did was point me closer and closer to where I needed to go, and the psychic calls rippling through the undersea were like blaring signs telling me to look this way, this way, you Hag swimming impossibly fast and smoothly through a briny sea, you...

And lo, come ye over the edge of an underwater rift, as geological scans of the whole undersea had belatedly been dumped into the The Map and were being verified in more exacting detail along my swim path, and look, look, fair explorer, at what lies before you...

The color of the dome below was extremely nauseating in the pspectrum, and the glass was mottled and seemed to pulse and writhe like a great brain. That probably meant it served as a psychic amplifier, and naturally a good chunk of that power was being used to prevent it from being detected by the orbital powers that would certainly like to get rid of it.

There were a lot of aquasyms around, and lines of biomechs were trundling along towards the city of Janus Prime a few hundred miles away, obviously not afraid of seismic scans showing where they were coming from or nothing.

The light of the sunken city was a Bad Thing, as it would send out a psychic shadow, as much as a real one. Avoiding that was rather hard, and required having a rather special kind of mindset, as opposed to just being sneaky.

That kind of mindset was what the Darkstalker Feat was all about. Phrenics and Aberrants had all kinds of crazy senses, and learning how to avoid those senses was just one of the things a stealth operator had to learn. If you didn’t have it in the high-level line of work, you were just an idiot.

That psychic light was hitting my mind and just passing on through in twisted harmony. It helped being able to change the ol’ brain structure and my entire Kirillian Aura, and naturally being relatively small, visibly transparent, and not having a wake or lateral line imprint all helped tons.

While infiltrating the city was an option, I wasn’t stupid. To win this war, these cities would have to be taken out, and the oceans were basically a lost cause at this point. Shit was going to be coming out of the seas forever, until they were emptied of biomass, and that was something we were just going to have to live with.

However, taking out cerevore biofactories where they were making their biomechs was totally a thing that could be done, and should shatter their organizational structure. Also, aquasyms were less than optimal servants on dry land, so while they could empty out the seas of life... that didn’t actually mean they were a huge threat on land, since those syms would basically be without legs, and their mobility hampered.

They could still DO it, of course, they just wouldn’t be optimized for butchering stuff on land. But, you know, enough numbers would do the job for anyone, and that was potentially a lot of syms...

We were going to have to do a nanite purge and literally sweep the seas clean of life, then reseed them. Just ugh... but better than a few zillion aquasyms heaving themselves out of the brine to attack...

Okay, one city’s coordinates locked down. The missiles to render it to a dust bowl were already getting psionic circuitry etched on them to defeat its deflection, misdirection, and spatial fields. The ‘vores were going to get a big surprise when the missiles landed. Naturally they couldn’t be sending out active signals to detect incoming, either, or they’d be detected.

------

Once I withdrew to a safe distance, I headed for the surface.

The only safe way to teleport through water was a Waterjump, which was pretty specialized teleportation magic. The Warp definitely wanted me to try it, and no, I wasn’t going to do so.

What I did do was withdraw a few miles, head straight up to the Spiked Plains above this level of the sea, make contact with the razor-edged salts forming the ceiling of the sea, and dimension hop a thousand feet past them with an underpowered teleport from Chalice.

I wound up a few hundred feet up in the air, popped my wings and jets, and swooped away. There were no spotters or anything of consequence up here, as the shifting, bubbling, and wailing plains, crystals warring soprano rising and falling constantly, was not conducive to any kind of listening post.

Teleporting was either in a straight line, or had to follow the curve of a terrestrial mass. Water futzed up teleporting across it on a curve, as the fact it was moving disrupted the dimensional continuity of the geography, and you couldn’t ‘port into any volume of water, or through any reasonable amount of it. It was possible to draw a lived-line trail across water, if you could walk on water... but basically, to leave water you had to be touching land, and you generally couldn’t go through water to get where you wanted to go. Above it or around it, only, except for the shortest distances.

The Spiked plains did count as land, however. They were relatively fluid, rose and fell constantly, but they were still solid enough to count as land, just not permanent. Teleporting from contact with one to one of my Teleport Foci outside Janus Prime was totally possible.

From there, teleporting to the next mega-city being attacked by slightly different biomech and fleshtanks was totally possible as well. I had run by every single one of them, after all.

I had plenty of observational data from Ranthas and Briggsbros fighting all over the place, so I knew right where the shit was crawling out of the Spiked Plains (and now being subject to orbital lances when they did so), so I knew right where they were entering, could choose a location close by, likely cracked open by shockwaves from the bombardment, and head down into the deep again.

------------

That was how pretty much the next ten days went for me. I did a lot of swimming. I saw a lot of exotic aquatic life, most of which was being eaten and replaced by aquasyms. I saw whole squadrons of biomechs, fleshtanks, siegeshells, crawl carriers, and the like down there, vast underwater hordes of aquasyms of all sizes, and vast expanses of the alkaline oceans emptied of the odd and strange life that existed down here.

I painted their locations. Drones landed on the saltpack above and tracked them by noise, planning on all sorts of special deliveries.

Janus Prime’s fighting largely wound down. The primary gap in the Shield Wall was covered by enough guns that nothing was getting in, the deployment point for any biomechs was also covered by waiting cannons and missiles, and there were no reinforcements coming from above.

As for the stuff that had already gotten in and was hiding in the nooks and crannies, waiting to dine on all the little homo sapiens running around... well, they would keep the Termites busy for a long time.

The ability of the Far Future to slaughter in multitudes was quite impressive. Special toxins were blown through endless amounts of tunnels, eating away at black carapaces, which would weaken, turn brittle, and then their acidic blood would spurt out at the least contact, and they’d bleed to death in a steaming pile of ugh. The Brain Ward was being increasingly finely tuned, making it more and more unpleasant for the cerevores to stick around, and they and their pslaved humans were being slaughtered and pushed back on all fronts by some seriously upset locals.

The acrid stench of dead Xenos coming apart was everywhere, and burning out a lot of noses for a lot of people. It didn’t matter, the Xenos were still shot everywhere they went. If people died in explosions of acid, they died, and so did the Xenos, and that much less biomass was available.

Elements from Janus Prime were already moving to help out the other cities, especially since the G&G elements there were almost always the core of the existing defense with their unbroken and on-time communication lines and uncompromised commanders. Furthermore, assets from spaceborne landing elements were starting to come down and reinforce the land-bound cities, and really make a go of what had been losing fronts in several of the other mega-cities.

I painted twelve different ‘vore biofactories as I circled the continent, locked in the coordinates, and Duke Parablum pushed the button.

-------

Duke Rimval sat in his chair in the Dungeon, his displays up and reports coming through, some live, some recorded. Dividing his attention psionically wasn’t hard, and processing all the information the same, using some extra juice to match the effect of a naturally impossibly high Intelligence. Bluma could do much the same and then transfer over as much or as little as he needed, also.

He tapped a holo-button, and felt the pulse go out through the Brain Ward, as fully a thousand Mentats in metaconcert sent out the searching pulse through it, at a specific target.

Goldspire seemed serene and clean on the surface, and then the overwhelming, directed power of the Mentats hit it, and the unremarkable, ‘clean’ vibes from it broke and shattered, revealing a massive, seething alien presence beneath, shocked and startled that their cover had been broken.

He almost regretted knowing the Ranthas. They were just too Throne-damned good and lucky at what they did.

His fingers stabbed at eight more buttons, danced to nine more.

In response, precise holes opened in the great Shield Dome of the city, above nine specific areas that housed Huldeiver industries and devoted workforces, especially those with Underspire holdings.

Nine full barrage orbital lances came down with raging fusion fire at the unprotected Spires, Bloks, and factories. Atomic fire drilled deep, and durasteel and plascrete skipped the melting phase and went right to superheated gas as the ravening fire from orbiting vessels neutralized those targets emphatically.

That hundreds of thousands, potentially several million, innocents had died in the barrage, he could only steel his heart to, curse the cerevores, and know that he would do it again if he had to. Clearing those areas would have taken a great deal of time, and if it came to personal combat, many losses. Nobody wanted to get involved with that many body-riding alien brains with psionic powers, and cancelling their threat was more important than preserving the lives and technology they commanded.

Thousands of soldiers were moving on other Huldeiver holdings at the same time. He could already see the fighting breaking out, and Bluma was relaying the first contact with cerevores and the mutant creatures and humans they were riding and commanding.

But the enemy was surprised, and the fight was winnable.

He turned his eyes and watched as Duke Parablum’s gifts descended on the planet elsewhere.

----------

Timing was key.

The orbital lances came down, punching open a path roughly fifty feet wide into the Spiked Plains and the waters below, blowing the sea water apart into hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements, forcing them back with the sheer violence, and ramming into the psionic-powered domes of the deep cities with terrible force.

The domes responded with precognitive speed, barely getting up in time to meet the plunging orbital strikes, their positions fully compromised the instant they did so.

Before the seawaters could close, missiles plunging down at miles/second slid through the opening they had made, hit that dome, and weren’t stopped by it.

Massive areas of the sea and sea floor rose towards the sky as suns went off in the deep dark. The cities were atomized, searing radiation cooked anything within a couple miles of the blast, and the salt plains above, already punctured, lifted towards the heavens as the waters became plasma and tried to fly free.

Around the continent, massive psychic shockwaves of pain, terror, and oblivion flooded through the telepathic networks of the invaders, and sent them reeling in dismay and disbelief at the coordinated strike. The cleverest of the field commanders instantly realized their bases had been located, even as multiple explosions rent the Wards of the undersea entrances to the Deepspire locations they had infiltrated so many of the cities with, and right on the heels of that psychic scream, the waters came rumbling in for them.