Four needle beams stabbed down as the Widow’s Bite came out of cloak. The alarms on the elvar sunsail screamed in dismay at the abrupt appearance of a human cloaked ship atop them, unable to believe it had approached them so closely and not been picked up by gravimetrics.

The needle beams punched through the primary midship shield emitters before they could go up, completely ignoring the fact the elvar ship was still supposed to be cloaked. The attacking ship was already rolling away as the elvar ship tried wildly to evade, molten matter and burning air venting out the holes in the ship and betraying their position as the engines of the Widow’s Bite lined up and flared to life.

There were heavy, focused guns, and then there was full output of the ship’s engines. The Bite sliced the elvar ship directly in two, and secondary explosions of psychic conduits and the shattered engine core blew the halves apart almost instantly.

------

A singular MF-Class Gunboat flashed into tactical range and locked down the last elvar ship before it could go into Jamming speed and flee.

Azure had no problem picking out the elvar vessel despite its holocloaks and gravimetric displacement; that’s what Rantha eyes and forward tactical laen magnopanes were for. The engines that took up over a third of the ship roared with outsized glee as she drove in.

The elvar weren’t slow to respond as their point defenses lit up, but Azure had all the angles of their defenses worked out, and leisurely danced around the bursts of the gunners, their juiced reflexes and everything still outpaced by those of a Rantha as she punched through their shields before they could launch fighters, and began to unload.

Or, more precisely, she led the ways for the ten drones mirroring her in her blast shadow to plunge into their targets.

Not even a psycho-reactive hull that could conduct impacts throughout its length deals well with Sun Strikes shots disrupting that self-same conductivity, and as Azure corkscrewed, Lizma and Todi strapped into the gunner stations pulsed shots into point defenses, shield emitters, and gun batteries that were as good as painting for the drones.

Fusion eruptions blew apart the hull behind them as a line of eight explosions tore apart the psycho-diamond spun hull of the sunsail, and then the primary guns of the Blue Yonder danced sunfire and shrapnel down the side of the ship. The last two missiles breached into the heart of the ship, and politely blew the shit out of it.

The Yonder yawed and spun with a degree of agility the Sunwasps erupting out of the far side of the elvar ship could only envy, and that was disregarding its size. They were also not at all delighted by the streams of charged particles bright as the sun blazing from the top and bottom of the ship, wiping four of the elvar ships before they could do anything, like batting flies out of the air.

Half the squadron made the bad choice of pouncing after the fleeing ship as their crippled mothership raged with atomic fires, and its solar sails peeled away and lost form and power as the psychic matrices empowering them were ravaged with actinic disruption. Lizma and Toli were perfectly happy to show them what Natural Gunners were capable of with overcharged heavy proton autolances bearing Sun Shots, and /tellepathic coordination and united awareness, along with completely ignoring the misdirecting holofields of the elvar fighters.

Six more Sunwasps blew apart in the next six seconds, walking from one field of fire right into the beams of the next and getting blown apart.

Like a spreading flower, the rest of the squadron peeled off in the face of that much murderously accurate fire, especially in the face of the closely-shielded gunboat dancing about like a fluttering moth... and as if choreographed, the Yonder spun in a half-circle with them as the two guns let loose with a strobing arc of fire right into the bellies of the breaking Sunwasps. Eight more ships blew apart entirely, and the last two were clipped and went tumbling wildly away.

Natural Gunner was a wonderful Talent for video game addicts, and what was more video gamey than deep space shootouts with enemy pilots with boosted reflexes and arrogant belief in their own elitism? While Azure technically didn’t need them to shoot her gunports at all, the fact remained they were better at it than she was, and they were eager to try some point defense gunnery out, so why not indulge them?

The elvar starfighters were limping back to their crippled ship when their systems blared, and even the best of them paled as the Bared Saber came out of Jam into tactical range with engines on full, and his prow cutting through the void like an arc of solid starlight...

------

The light cargo freighter came out of Jamming at the appointed coordinates, less than a thousand miles from the elvar vessel waiting in cloak. It dropped the two ore containers promptly, and they barely cleared the locking bays before the freighter was burning away on a new vector, and returned to Jamming speed as quickly and discreetly as possible.

The Dust Between Stars came swooping in on the containers, the human psion next to its captain looking utterly unmoved and calm, bored even, her demeanor proof enough that the Coronals hadn’t planned anything sneaky.

He wondered how his dark kin had fared in their ambush on the Coronal ship. Either way, it mattered little to him, as a deal of such scale would doubtless find others wishing to pursue it. Void Osmium did not just grow on trees, after all, and the humans’ desire for it had to be great to deal with the likes of him.

His proximity alarms going off did manage to lift his eyebrows, and he almost turned to look at the waiting human psion, who looked mildly intrigued at the noise, and then the tactical display came up.

There was no mistaking the asymmetric design, looking more like a wreck than a viable ship, even for the hideously rigid and overly-done style of human design. The organic and flowing parts of these ships were unclean and depraved, and a triple howl of eagerness to do battle came flooding across the aether, ringing against the lattice of his ships.

Demonic light cruisers of the Warp. They must have noticed the freighter’s departure from easily-monitored flight paths, and had shadowed it to see where it led and if there was booty available. Finding an elvar ship moving to pick up a dropped cargo was more than enough excuse for a fight.

Sunhawk laughed softly to himself. The Coronals would have purged these ships themselves, for the honor and glory of it; they would never have dealt with them, even in passing. His Sunwasps were already launching, and his beamers coming to bear as his solar sails glowed. The shuttles taking possession of the cargo would merely be getting it out of the line of fire at this point.

Three demonic light cruisers against an Elvar Monarch-class. He barely had to think for his crew to lurch into eager motion, and head for the fray.

“Captain, I will leave you to your fight. Contact us again when you are ready to deal.” The psion bowed, and very abruptly, there was a pop as she teleported away.

Sunhawk’s head turned to the screen, where for the briefest of moments there was a blip in the distance, almost ten thousand miles out, as something came out of cloak, and just as quietly fell back into it.

Teleportation had expanded range in the void. That would have been right near the limit of the psion’s ability...

The Umbrans..., he mused to himself, and smiled in appreciation of their cunning. The Coronals would certainly be above this kind of play, but the Umbrans... the Umbrans would pit two foes against one another without hesitation, especially if the odds were still on the side of the elvar and their deals would continue in the future. A subtle leak of information, perhaps? A course correction to put the freighter into sensor range of a waiting ambush? A spy planted among the Warped crew?

All those things were possible. Even minor information fed into the mindscape for some lucky diviner to stumble across, if the hands were subtle enough...

The Dust Between Stars rose singing to the attack, glorious waves of psi-focused hard light already ranging out ahead, and his own little battle in the void began.

Truly, this deal with the Coronals was going to have its own share of excitement...

------

I was watching through a dozen sets of eyes as the Void Osmium was offloaded, and I was sure that many interested eyes would be following where it was going and what it was going to be used for. The Engines Division of Rantha Shipyards was a big enough place for even something as precious and rare as Void Osmium to get lost in, especially if precautions were being taken. The yards of Threshold Station were, after all, almost as sprawling as a mega-city itself, as being a waybase for repair of ships up to five kilometers long demanded a lot of space and storage for both manpower and machines.

Equipping a Dreadnought or Star Carrier-class vessel would require one hundred tons of Void Osmium for the Harmonic Drive, something we simply couldn’t afford right now. A mere twenty tons, however, was enough to equip several light cruisers, and even more gunboats, as desired.

The fact there wasn’t any Void Osmium left anywhere within a thousand light years, just to get the first few ships equipped, was just something we would have to live with... and the technology to get it Energized was up above 15 on the tech curve, so trading for it was the only solution for now. Naturally enough, we were quietly dealing for any reserves willing to be sold elsewhere. It was a rare material with niche uses; finding out it had major applicability to a new stardrive system would send the price of it through the moon, even if the Coronals desired otherwise. The Mekkers alone would buy up the entire supply just to make the drive unviable, to say nothing of other competitors and profiteers.

Which naturally meant that one of the moves of the Umbrans was now going to be to secure what production and trade there was of it, and so the supply...

It was going to take five hundred tons to work up a Harmonic Drive big enough for the Celestial Tribute. I was still looking forward to it...

-------

-Yo, Mom, brainfart time!- came an /tell via Band out of nowhere.

I glanced at the speaker. I naturally knew all the girls, as I had to shuffle the souls through myself into the ova from which they were born. They were as individual as fingerprints, and I had a perfect+ memory to boot.

This generation was all born of our people who had died in combat, and they knew it. They were still forbidden from contacting old friends and family until they secured their incarnation, of course.

-Princess!-, I /smiled despite myself. I could almost see Delores Rantha blushing straight to her ears at the reply. All the eldest Ranthas called her that, wouldn’t tell her why, and she wasn’t allowed to go deep diving on thrilling, deadly hunts with My Queen yet. Cha 30 and get your Incarnation Awareness, she was told. -What is on your mind, Delores?-

-You know that old game system called Spelljammer?- she /asked quickly.

-Sure. These wacky arcane space rules seem to reflect a lot of it. No Crystal Spheres, however.- Which didn’t mean such a universe didn’t exist somewhere. Was almost bound to, as a matter of fact.

-Well, you know how so much of this reality is like diluted gaming rules, right? So, question... what if the Crystal Sphere was the Heliosphere? Are there phlogiston rivers out there, in some Dark Matter form?-

Thoughtstream Seven flinched, and math, spellcraft, and psicraft started flying at improbably high levels of thought.

Detail-Oriented was such a wonderful Talent for finding overlooked minor stuff. Naturally, there was no phlogiston, no Crystal Spheres, and so we’d written off the rivers...