“The drow are having a celebration.”

We all looked over at Celestia’s words. As the one with the most experience in the world of fighting and duels, she was always looking at the events and happenings at the periphery, giving us new places to go and things to address.

“How big?” I asked, cross-referencing the term. Drow didn’t exactly have happy holidays.

“A million?”

All our eyebrows lifted as we stacked up hoverboards on Disks for efficient resale, never lose them looting reflexes, and added some rather high-end weapons and defensive toys from the dead drow scattered around the place.

This gang of hoverboarders had pissed someone off for doing something, a bounty had been posted, and we had wandered over to claim it. One hundred and forty-seven more drow for the Gloom, burning with shadowfire right now, and rather astonished at how they’d all gotten so dead so readily. Chit cards, portable valuables, and other personal belongings they didn’t need anymore went on the stack.

There were a lot of holes in the surrounding buildings, some dents and smears on the stone, craters in the ground, slices and gashes in the walls and floor, and a number of flechettes and darts, with accompanying acidic craters or fused pits, sticking in things here and there.

Hey, the money was good, and we needed to get Courtier of Death/Elvar active. Lots of gratuitous slaughter of drow certainly helped, and this lot had finished mine off.

“A million? They are doing it in the Heart of Blood, then.” The spatial-distorted arena was up to ten miles wide, enclosed inside a half-mile circle. The cameras were everywhere and could pick out everything from above for more than a million attendees, broadcast it on massive holo-screens, or more personal views for those in the very expensive personal suites.

Naturally the high drow nobility would be there, and everyone who wanted to be noticed by them would be there, too. Clan leaders, mercenary captains, Warlock Masters, Bladewitch Headmistresses, old noble families, slave masters, pirate commanders, raider lords, and even the necrochemysts of the city would wander out of their fetid holes in all their death-obsessed bioengineered grandeur to watch the show and drink in the carnage, fear, and death.

In our wanderings through the city, we’d plumbed the other side of a few dozen Portals, but they’d all been on this side of the Rift. Perhaps there was geographical correlation, and we needed to go to the opposite side of the city... quite a task for an ecumenopolis on the inside of a sphere.

My other girls had been finding plenty of Portals too, particularly as we contacted populations of hidden Hyn and their Void Brothers. Some were completely paranoid and wanted nothing to do with us, which was fine, we were hardly going to force them. Some were enthusiastic at the potential of getting their children out of here, and were willing to work with distant cousins, such as it were.

The one uninhabited world we’d found was an easy launch point, and if dangerous, it was nowhere near as threatening as Gloom and its many stealthy, shadowy inhabitants. The hyn that were emigrating were adapting quickly, helped by the quiet support, instant schooling, and guidance on what and how to do things as they built a new society of their own, on a world far from anything.

They spent a lot of time in the light there, too, driving the Gloom out of them...

A million combatants meant the drow would be drawing slaves and contestants from everywhere. It would be a true meat grinder of a fight, and the prizes would be impressive, to say nothing of instant recognition.

Some breshkt making it to the end would naturally be unheard of. But... it was an easy way to get to the middle of the city, and some of the Portals there were more open for use, and should be on the other side of the Rift...

But that really wasn’t the issue. The proper thing would be finding a ship that would be going to human-controlled space and worlds, and hitching a ride on it, by hook or by crook. The odds that there would not be some humans at such an event, doubtless traitorous slave dealers or beast hunters providing stock for the slave pits, would be low. Getting aboard their ships wouldn’t be all that difficult, and given the nature of their work, they would be either going to worlds with heavy populations they could loot for stock, primitive worlds with creatures they could hunt and sell, or wealthy worlds looking to buy the latter.

We’d have a much better look at the docks near the primary Portals to Gloomheart. All we had to do was locate one viable ship, and we were good to go.

“Think they’ll take us?” Keva asked thoughtfully. “They should be trawling for any combatants they can get their hands on at this point.”

“Do we want to get involved there?” Jensa returned narrowly, filching out a credit-stick and tossing it on the pile. “There’s going to be some real monstrosities in a pit fight that big.”

Which was totally true. Monstrosities were generally taken down by swarms in such situations, and hyperaggression was going to be all the rage.

“More likely that anyone who stands out is going to inspire some opportunistic challengers to be eliminated and steal their glory,” I answered, running through stolen memories of similar events in the past.

“Ooooh, that sounds like real fun,” Keva piped up, eyes glowing more than usual at the thought of some real duels.

“See if they’ll take us. If they will, start arranging us transport to the arena. There’ll be plenty of stuff to do on the way there...”

Celestia nodded and started the process of registering over the local cybernet. It didn’t interfere with her cleaning up at all, of course...

=======

The goblin presence in AK97-Proxima died off almost as quietly and much faster than it had existed.

What particular event had driven them to take shelter in this system we had no idea of, and really didn’t bother investigating. The Mothball Fleet, fully kitted out with Tachyon and Harmonic Drives, glided into the system from the Phlo entry point, well above the solar incline, and descended upon them with merciless savagery.

Goblins were genetically engineered to take territory, conquer, and survive. A few little green goblins could reproduce with amazing speed while surviving in total shitty conditions, and as things improved, hobgoblins and urgobs would eventually be born. Thus, the short little fire-happy greenie runts were the quickest to flee to fight another day, while the hobgoblins planned for empire, and the urgobs raided and weakened their enemies through surprise attacks or plundering savagery, whatever was appropriate.

It was built into their blood, and no relationship with goblins ever withstood the test of time. When they felt their numbers were high enough, they surged to the attack, and if you integrated them into your society, when the psychic wave of their fleets hit, all your goblin slaves or neighbors turned into murderous throatslitters.

They were a scourge on the galaxy, and completely unrepentant about it. They were what they were, and had no remorse or mercy in them; only conquer, claim, subjugate, grow, and do it again.

The attack was thus unheralded, and messily thorough. Cloaked Umbran ships had plotted out the whole system’s holdings, and the Mothball Fleet hit them with a precision and timing only the Marks could allow.

Long-range sensor posts, forward sentry posts that hadn’t seen anything beyond passing Mi-Go for decades, were blown apart before they even knew they were under attack. Cargo vessels transporting food and raw materials were eliminated in engagements that never lasted more than a few minutes. No alarms or distress calls went out...

The Janus Home Fleet came ripping out of the Warp and burned their way along the solar incline once the periphery defenses were down.

------

Captain Tabitha Rantha adjusted the position of her ship precisely on the single vector that gave her the shot she wanted. The needlers were adjusted to maximum range, and every crewmember on board was hooked in to power them up for the punch that was needed.

Their target was the primary power plant of the Big Rock the goblins were building, a small moon’s-worth of starship. The equivalent of a small star had been constructed by goblin weird science down in the belly of the thing, the eventual power source for the massive engines that were being put into place after being slagged into their proper form by the solar plumes being drawn out of the system’s sun. It looked like baling wire and duct tape by human standards, but weird science didn’t care what you thought, it just worked.

The brains back on Janus III were running algorithms through a brand-new combat simulator the size of a Blok, designed by the Strategos Council and Anatolia, and capable of handling combat sims of a hundred battlezones if required, all possible with real-time Marktell relays. The ship’s engineers were pattern-Focusing to keep the ship’s cloaks operating seamlessly as it hovered in space between the hordes of goblins ships moving about.

Algorithms converged. Formulae resolved, targeting solutions gathered, and a very green light went on in all their minds.

Four needle beams plunged down.

Various gantries, walkways, light cargo vessels, and goblins in the way evaporated in the path of the plunging flares of cutting force-light. The two power regulators, the primary containment field generator, and the emergency fuel shutoff were sheared right through at an optimum moment. The wild surges of the suneater reactor had stilled for a breath to gather their power and energies... and now all the things that contained their fury were gone.

The Widow’s Bite’s sudden appearance in the middle of the construction zone probably wouldn’t even have been noticed for a few minutes if not for the blazing needle beams that had blinded every goblin who looked upon them. Still, it was enough to make all their jaws drop in shock at the unfamiliar ship design.

The Harmonic Jump pulsed, and for one second, the Widow’s Bite moved in a specific direction at .15c. Twenty-thousand miles later, and out of range of any guns that could possibly get online in time, the primary drives engaged as it fell out of tactical range... and sixteen more needle beams plunged down onto a scattered number of field generators and heavy gun emplacements, plunging deep and finding interesting things to cut through and set alight.

A raging fusion explosion swelled and blew out through the great canyon opened into the heart of the ship, tearing away everything within and sending it shooting out into space as masses of ashes and slag, circled by those specific weapon and field sites igniting in counterpoint harmony.

Leaving a raging atomic catastrophe behind, the Widow’s Bite faded into cloak as it achieved a great enough distance.

It had already accomplished the primary objective, taking out sixteen separate different cloaked urgob hunter-killer stealth vessels scattered around the inner system, their ships noted when they docked to resupply at specific places, and beacons placed on their hulls activated by psi when needed.

The assassin fleet of the goblins had been completely neutralized before the Janus Fleet hit the outer system and barreled into the first goblin station that could put up a fight... a station whose coms had already been hit and who couldn’t get past the psychic static before the Fleet showed up to bury them under a blazing torrent of extremely well-informed fire. The shield harmonics knowledge alone, learned from observation of multiple maintenance tests, was invaluable.

The Janus Fleet swept on in what would become known as the Proxima Vise. The goblin ships that fled from them ran right into the waiting Mothball Fleet, who held them to tactical speed until the Janus Fleet could come up behind them and crush them implacably.