What would go down in Ruk Lore as the Battle of the Screaming Star began with the arrival of the Compact fleet.

Wasn’t too hard to sense them coming, as the pressure wave in the Warp of that many ships, even using Necrojumping, still bowed out in front of them, and we had recently made several discoveries of technology that could sense things across dimensional boundaries from out of the blue somewhere, hmm, hmm, wonder where from?

We had mass shadows calculated, the Ruk happily informed us of how their forces were meant to be deployed, sensor ranges were established, and there was some careful movement of Kuiper objects, i.e. random comets, asteroids, meteors, and similar stuff.

The attackers were expunged from the Warp in squirts of black-green necroic bile, no danger from the Warp for them. Twenty-three of them died instantly, and about ten times that received damage before they could get their shields up and knew they were under attack.

Storm-launching missile batteries unloaded into the area, just waiting for those Portals to get ripped open and the ships to emerge into real space. The ships had instantly shifted down to tactical speed, well outside of the Ruk’s patrol perimeters, totally safe... right into the lanes of mass shadows that made such jumps the easiest.

The sky was full of a lot of missiles coming in at just below light speed, which is a lot of kinetic energy to deal with if you don’t have shields up.

Rupturing spheroids and slug-ships ignited with bright lights, and were burning, spread out over millions of miles of space. Of course, it was a tithe compared to the incoming numbers, but even as more Portals were opening, the ether was being filled with telepathic screams and panic about an ambush... and an ambush it most certainly was.

The Corunsun fleet came streaking in with Tachyon Drives, hit mass shadows, and was burning at full speed in tactical. Behind and between them came the brutal bulk of both Citadels’ squadrons.

The Ruk naturally didn’t build agile, overly fast ships. That wasn’t their thing. What they did make is ships that were very tough, and true to their ability with Fire, had marvelous punching capacity.

They didn’t specialize in harassing fire, constant barrages, high cyclic rates, long range sniping, or anything like that. Their guns tended to be designed to hit shields and hulls with overwhelming force, tearing apart defenses to get at the meat of their enemies. Their gunners were excellent, and seldom had overmuch problems hitting another heavy target, but against lighter and more agile foes, the lower cyclic rate of their cannons could easily work against them.

Cue to humans raging in with Storm-salvoes of railgun-launched munitions, slamming into the enemy shields from multiple vectors as the ships moved to restrict evasion routes, coordinated fire, and specifically targeted engines and maneuvering thrusters.

There was no need to go for kill shots. The Ruk were plenty happy to pick off the sitting ducks waiting for them.

The Compact had attuned their shield tech to deal with the Ruk style of firing, allowing extreme and concentrated focused shielding that would hopefully recharge in time to deal with follow-up shots, as maneuvering made them harder targets.

Humans spraying them with railgun loads and banks of pulse cannons, breacher rounds, and even pressor beams were not something they were initially prepared to deal with. Overjuiced shields couldn’t allocate everywhere with enough power, and light damage rapidly accumulated to multiple systems required for speed and maneuverability, on organic and inorganic vessels alike.

Every Ruk gunnery crew was working with one or two of our ships, knew right where to aim, and when the target was set up, they fired.

Those heavy space-burning shells were crippling when they hit, smashing through the overloaded shields and going deep inside the enemy hulls to find things to make into momentary stars.

The tight fleet swept through the flank of one of the three deployment zones, the path of their concentrated firepower taking them right into the heart of the fleet coming out of the Warp to dire alarms. Amid ships blowing up from waiting missiles and wails of surprise, the hammering blows and blaring alarms of incoming ships basically helped add to frantic panic and uncertainty, while the Compact’s precious plans and calculations went right out the window.

Cantor and I had spent hours setting up hundreds of Marks to start up a telepathic coordination system between our different species. I kept the Ruk largely isolated from all but their counterparts in the Markspace, and of course they could talk to each other without a problem.

I could not conceal Mom sitting up there at the top of the Markspace, and the Ruk could only look Up There and realize something post-Twenty was silently watching them, and that was all.

Of course, then there were the two of us.

I didn’t spare them, and I let them have it all. They were gawking at me, a Seventeen with Charisma to There and Warlord to That and Diplomacy and Intimidate Ranks at full with all the Masteries and Feats and Holy Shiznit Pink Twinkies, Batman...

I didn’t show this sort of stuff to pretty much anyone below Fifteen, as it really was too intimidating, but they got the full Monte, because they were the Ruk, and they’d seen it all.

Well, no, they’d never seen anything like me, and if Cantor was only a Rantha Ten/Eleven Expert, she still burned brighter than almost any of them.

The Great Elder could tell instantly that Cantor had a connection to the Divine. He was a full Twenty, the first non-Rantha mortal one I’d ever met, a Cleric of his gods who didn’t dare wield the magic he had left to him, and his gods were now cold and silent. Dead, perhaps, and imprisoned if not.

He saw Cantor and knew she had access to the power of Faith. His eyes blazed like stars, and he and all the techpriests who we’d Marked (and who we ended up Marking a lot more of), converged on her Charisma 40-some Presence in the Markspace, with many, many questions.

As for the Kings, I was a base Seventeen ExLite, and for most mortal purposes considered a virtua Twenty-One. And yes, my Charisma was over 50, which is Divine Avatar level and possibly more, and the two Kings were a Sixteen and a Fifteen respectively.

It didn’t matter how long their people had once ruled the galaxy. They were not my equals, and they were staring it in the face.

-------

Chalice was humming a nameless Song that was pounding in the blood of the Marked, and the Ruk were piping it into their comms and broadcasting it everywhere. Despite being a ‘distraction’, it drove them to work faster, surer, harder, and kept them focused like they’d never felt.

“Trembel, vir kommen..” they chanted in low, deeply ominous voices to the refrain, and oh, the emotions riding behind glacial expressions and crystal eyes.

“Todberg segelt across the stars

Crystal eyes oberscheinen the nacht

Fires in hearts to rival suns

Where dreams haft died,

Nightmares schrei,

But whose, whose ghosts sind heulend now?

Trembel, oh ohhh oh, Trembel, vir kommen...

Our elders würden grieve

But their war dauert an

Untodden, eternal, within the Warp.

There sind no rest for the Ruk

There sind Work und War

In Death, und in Life.

Trembel, oh ohhh oh, Trembel, vir kommen...

Outlast uns, who sah planets born?

Besiege uns, who sah stars die?

Whelm against uns, who brechen Time’s Siege?

Kommen sie, ihr living

Kommt then, soon tod.

Ihr fight uns now, und kiss the void.

Then you’ll fight uns dead, und ghosts vill töten.

Trembel, oh ohhh oh, Trembel, vir kommen...”

------

We were outnumbered crazily, and if they could have converged on us, they certainly could have blown every one of our ships out of the sky.

Unfortunately, we were at full burn, mowing through the heart of their formation, as preplaced ordnance filled space with Macross Missile Massacres, and the most coordinated fire the Ruk or the Compact had ever seen plowed a most lethal and explosive path through their forces, sending them reeling, trying to recover, and by the time they moved to chase, intercept, or try to hold us, we were past them and burning for the Citadels, laughing at them.

They did chase us then, but that was their next mistake.

The Ruk ships spun around as the best tractor tech in the galaxy fixed on them; the human ships powered forwards, the Ruk shut off their drives, and all those big blasty guns went pointing backwards.

There was a whole lot of really precise targeting data getting shared, and I was the coordinator.

Space-burning rounds went blazing out in overlapping series, and the closest Compact ships were picked off with layered targeting far beyond the ability of their shields to withstand. While they weren’t necessarily destroyed, ship after ship went careening out of control, taking heavy damage to the face from those chanting Ruk weapon crews who, without their engines needing all that power, were cycling shots nearly twice as fast as standard... and with uncanny accuracy.

The Compact gathered, but could only still back out of range and deny the brutal Ruk gunners their choice of targets. When they did, the Ruk ships spun back about on their axis, their engines ignited, and they burned for the Citadel, whose Very Large Array of defenses was already deployed and certainly happy to start unloading to greet the pursuing Compact ships, and had thwarted any attempt by the other two-thirds of the incoming fleet to intercept us.

The Compact was also not happy to find out that that array was twice as thick and powerful as they’d come to expect from a Citadel ship. Of course, they realized why when they finally came into sensor range of the Citadel itself, and saw the silent second Citadel, ports yawning wide, drifting there in space next to the lit-up, aggressive, and very dangerous Citadel Unforgotten, who was already warmed up and ready to receive them.

The Grimshield had come out of the Warp...