Various information sources reported a great deal of activity on the end of the Coronals and Umbrans. Whatever conference they assembled to decide what to do didn’t take very long before they were calling everyone.

They also requested the transport be sent down early. It appeared they had a lot of stuff they wanted to stuff aboard it. And would there be any chance I had an extra munitions hauler available, and knew any mercenary captains who might be ready for business?

The fees weren’t cheap, especially for the middle of a war zone, but they were fair. Family connections and imperial funds were exploited to the max, and they even offered to take some of the crews of the devastated imperial ships off our hands, if that was alright...

The whole planet calmed down rather quickly as the rather desperate Coronals and Umbrans made hasty plans, and started looting family armories and arsenals long hidden for everything they could. Loyal noble troops were moving out quickly in many locations, and we were actually letting them do so, to the amazement of many.

The Stuttgards, however, didn’t get to do the same. Big fellows in power armor swept in, announced that the Corunsuns really had no use for their holdings, and proceeded to blow the heck out of them and the people within them.

Crown House Stuttgard, which had prided itself the greatest house of the Noble Sector, suffered a rather calamitous collapse of its holdings on Diadem, and the ships that had joined the Imperial Armada were all complete losses, too. House Lord Malkomiv was on Diadem, and didn’t make it off alive, although he tried. Alas, Azure and her Rainbow Squadron were on the task, running his personal yacht down and blowing it out of space with casually murderous efficiency.

House Stuttgard would now have to go through a rather gripping contest for Lordship of the House, as the Crown Prince had been aboard the Family’s flagship with the Imperial Armada, and was the third ship fed into the Gehenna. Unfortunately, there were massive failures in the lifepods of the ship to launch, and certainly nothing made it more than a hundred meters out of the tumbling hangar bays before dying... and then the hangars were blown to Hell and back to stop that nonsense.

Tens of, if not more than a hundred million, Imperial sailors and troops died in the Massacre at Diadem. The holdings of Houses Stuttgard, Pacifica, Misoma, and Carilithee were generally reduced to wandering atoms, and their contributions to the Imperial Armada were also completely lost.

------

Unfortunately for House Stuttgard, Diadem had long become the center of power for the House, and while they had numerous armory and production worlds in reserve, their losses on Diadem were fundamental shocks that threatened its position greatly.

I indicated my displeasure with their positions and actions regarding their fellow noble Great House of the Corunsuns. Very quickly, there were some one-sided negotiations taking place, wherein, for the privilege of not being utterly crushed and driven out into the stars to find some place somewhere else to set up shop, assets were being given up, systems changing hands, and shares of megacorps and ownership rights in guilds and unions here and there were passed over.

The Empire was all well and good, but the Corunsuns were here. I... was here. I wasn’t going to let them stab me in the back, and if they wanted to start taking assassination potshots at the members of the Family and Foundation, I was going to wipe bloodlines down to the bastards.

It must have come across rather clearly. The non-interference and neutrality pledges while buying back their skins were deftly supplemented with Geases on the House Lords. If they were quietly seething over the turnings of fate and hoping loudly inside that the Emperor crushed us to paste, they handed over whole planets, and assets to rival them, quite happily so that I would not unleash my fleet upon them.

I did not bother to claim Diadem. It was an ecumenopolis with a population of hundreds of billions. While I had significant hidden assets in place who were now eagerly seizing places and positions of power, trying to take over a place with so many people indentured to the service of rival Houses appealed to me not at all.

I did, however, loot the place pretty badly, taking away gigatons of supplies, stockpiles, warehoused goods, and the machinery to make many of them. The previous owners could only grit their teeth and wave goodbye as cargo haulers full to the brim with their plunder ascended with all the fruits of looting a hostile enemy capitol city.

There were six warehouses devoted just to the artistic leanings of the Stuttgard, some of the pieces nigh-on priceless. Van Gogh’s Starry Night was one of them. I wondered what the Stuttgards would pay to get it back... as well as the Regalia of the Lord and the Crown Prince, the messengers who were supposed to sequester them away somehow waylaid and some of the most key documents of the House having fallen into my hands...

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But all that occurred some time after the heavy freighter converted to a temporary passenger conveyance left Diadem with forty-two Coronal Knights, Umbran Inquisitors, and their Squires and Operators aboard an open-windowed modular container, by which they became among the first Imperial citizens to witness a functioning FTL drive in action from onboard the ship. They were all thinking I was going to drive them mad by putting them in a glass shell and forcing them to look upon the Warp during a Helljump, and instead the Tachyon Drive cut in.

They watched the sun behind them recede with appalling speed, and could literally see stars moving past across the sky.

Ameradaspace was 2166 parsecs away. They would be there in under twenty hours. If the ships they had requested left very quickly, they might just make it to the system before the Xenoswarm did.

The Amerada forces had been informed they were on their way, and why, and what they were bringing. Having already been abandoned by the Empire, the cynicism of the people there was naturally at its height, and although they weren’t going to turn down any help for facing what was coming, these empty-hearted Coronals and Umbrans were going to find anything but a hero’s welcome when they got there.

Of course, I’d be watching. If they tried to flee the system, I was going to wipe their families, and there were kids who specialized in hunting down just these sorts of cowards for idle entertainment. By the looks on the faces of the Dukes, I didn’t think it was going to happen, and when they saw all the death duel requests from the fellows of their Orders, I didn’t think any of the underlings would try, either.

Having over twoscore challenges from your own Order hanging over your head was not something you could run from easily. Oh, you might try the Warp, and the Warp would protect you for a time... until it was more fun to send you back and see what you would try to do to keep living.

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Mata and Harley naturally got to field the waves of these two crushing blows back on Tellus. To say it rocked the Imperial Sector was not an exaggeration in the slightest. With the Pharaoh and Shogun Sector Fleets gutted, that left only the forces of the Imperial Sector available for any attempt to muster and put down the rebellion.

But if they did that, and the Xenos Swarms ripping through both of those Sectors started hitting their own, wouldn’t that mean they were sacrificing themselves, instead of some inconsequential systems meant to die to safeguard them?

As a result, the resistance to the very idea of sending out ships to the Rim to die in Khagan Sector was like iron, and even sending them to the nearby and nearly as prominent Noble Sector got precious little backing.

I made no secret of the number of Xenosym incursions coming up into Corunsun space, and the other noble Houses were also grappling with those attacks.

Some were smart and had straight up sworn fealty to me, both for survival and on the off chance that they had hooked themselves to a rising star. There were many changes getting made in several of those Houses, but at least I wasn’t shooting them en masse... like I was the House Krait nobles who thought raiding one of our factory worlds while we were busy elsewhere was a good idea.

I didn’t even give THOSE bastards a chance to ransom themselves. The kids closed in on their worlds, systems, and holdings through the stars and the shadows, and across fourteen different systems, the Great House of Krait vanished over the period of thirteen days from the Empire... along with six Houses Major, twelve Houses Minor, and several major corporations with millennia-long histories.

As it turns out, their workers didn’t much care for House Krait anyway, and the takeovers of their holdings went fairly smoothly overall. Sure, the occasional anti-matter core was sabotaged by diehard loyalists, and a few hundred million people would die as a result. But basically the kids and their crews tore through them like they were wet paper, and generally got themselves some new worlds to play with.

------

The Emperor was being more active psionically than anyone living on the planet could actually remember... looking for all those prominent spies placed closely to Him, of course.

None of the Marked actually worked in the Imperial Palace itself, getting no closer than the supplementary extensions to the High Council, where Harley spun lies blatant and subtle, and Mata worked hard at feeding them exactly the information they wanted from all the disparate places of the bureaucracy. There were even some redundant and confusing regulations that were openly suspended during this period of time, just to make things function as they should have, instead of how they were planned not to.

Naturally everyone thought they were coming together and working harder and better when faced with such an ominous threat, unaware that the protocols for removing the obfuscatory paper-pushing had been set in place long ago, and it all had actually nothing to do with them.

They really were some of the best government workers in the Empire. They were just in a system that was designed so that they would not to be able to do their jobs properly.

Mata and Harley noted that they had both been singled out for observation by the Emperor at one point or another. Happily, both of them had multiple thought-streams, and simply retracted their Nulls and offered up this custom-made cover personality that actually had no thoughts or memories of being a Null or Marked or a spy or any of that stuff.

The Emperor could certainly have found gaps or holes in the cover if He had time to mix, match, verify, and research... but He was the Emperor, and time was one thing He didn’t have enough of. He went into those memories, didn’t find anything serious He was looking for, or even signs of psionic tampering, and went on to look for someone else before He could actually realize that the whole lives of those thoughtstreams had been spun from whole cloth, as had the persona He'd been looking at. There was no ‘falsehood’ because everything had been constructed as a whole around the lives the two of them were leading.

There were random spontaneous combustions down in the Underspires as the Emperor went looking around for signs of spies and traitors, and occasionally found people He casually expunged. The Nulls and the Sources just slid past His eyes unless He specifically was looking for one of them... which, since He was doing a general search, meant He never did. There were no Marked on Tellus who were not Nulls, save for the Briggs boys in the Skraeling operations, as every psi working with them on Tellus had been either removed from the planet or simply not initiated.

The Emperor flitted His way through Mata’s support network, and couldn’t find anything wrong there, save for a general satisfaction with their lives that was a bit out of place on Tellus. But it meant they worked eagerly enough, and that was all the Emperor could hope for.

Did He reach out to me or Briggs? No, because He couldn’t see us, or even make out those around us easily, especially across the light years. Rivers of fate were converging, gathering, and His plans and machinations were heading into irrelevancy.

The whole Empire had seen my speech with the High Council by now... and that included the Warped. He could take the Warp Gods down at any time, and He was choosing not to. As the Xenosyms devoured world after world, the Empire’s faith in the Emperor dropped ever more quickly, and with it His power and influence...