The Warp Surge hit the Imperial Sector and slowly petered out as it ran into the heartland of the Empire and the Emperor’s faithful, who hadn’t lost their faith in Him even after he cut the other Sectors of the Empire off. They knew who was truly important, after all.

This was the most densely-populated, best-defended Sector of the Empire, but even so they groaned under the weight of what was undoubtedly the greatest invasion by the Warp since the Fall.

After all, the rest of the Empire wasn’t going to come to the aid of the Imperial Sector now!

Unlike the external Sectors, there was no risk of being eaten by besieging xenosyms if they chose to raid, so the drow turned out in force to enjoy this excursion, gather lots of hapless slaves, and arrange for the deaths of many, many humans and Warped if they so could.

Unfortunately for them, or perhaps in retrospect they were being manipulated by those truly playing the game, they had very much underestimated exactly who and what the Emperor of All Humanity was actually capable of. While some of their raiding trips for slaves and sacrifices went horrifically well for isolated, distracted, dismissive, or unready worlds who thought such sinister things could not happen to them, at other times they ran right into some catastrophically bad luck... and vivic fire.

Now, vivic fire had spread throughout the galaxy. The Mechanists had made all sorts of attempts to restrict it until ‘proper studies’ could be done, but it kept reappearing, especially among those who fought the Warp, the Undead, Aberrations, dark Elves, rogue psykers... well, basically the Coronals and Umbrans used it and totally ignored the Mechanists, the Assassins used it and ignored the Mechanists, the Imperial Marines and the Legions started using it and ignored the Mechanists, and all the rich and powerful used it and equipped their minions with it, and ignored the Mechanists.

The Mechanists turned out to be the easiest one of these forces to fight as a result, lacking the threat of eternal annihilation and destruction of the soul, and so became the preferred enemy to fight of all those sorts of factions, which led to a very, very sorry state and lackluster performance on the battlefield by the borgaii and their leaders.

After duly measuring just how crappy their performance was, the scorn from all the other competing factions, the very real fear the enemy had of this unwhite fire, and the fact that they needed psionic energy to make the stuff viable no matter what, the Mechanists duly announced that after spending several million intense man-hours of research and experimentation, the vivic fire seemed to be safe for the use of man and machine, and their opposition to its inclusion in the Imperial arsenal was duly withdrawn.

Shortly thereafter, they ‘confirmed’ that Sama Rantha was the acknowledged inventor and distributor of the vivic fire, and had been the driving force behind the mass mail that had sent its specifications throughout the galaxy. That news somehow got onto the Boole right on the heels of their announcements.

If their faces could have enjoyed the same range of motion after being cybered, they certainly would have had interesting expressions acknowledging the fact that an arch-traitor had invented one of the greatest weapons against the enemies of humanity, ever.

--------

“Duke Mychevver, you are a long way outside the Imperial Sector and the Sagittarius Cluster,” I noted to the greying Silvered Coronal Duke sitting out there in a Knight’s Lance Cruiser, gold cloak and all, very carefully keeping shields down and weapons de-powered.

“Contessa Rantha,” he replied respectfully, if warily. “I have been informed by some of my peers that you have reached agreements with them considering certain upgrades to their ships... and that you have been continuing to do them, regardless of the hostilities between you and the Empire.”

I flicked up my Mindclaw, glimmering solid gold, not translucent at all. “There are higher causes than the Emperor’s death project,” I replied neutrally, and I saw the flicker in his eyes. The Warp forces were grinding through the Imperial Sector, an unholy jihad of the Warp Gods slicing towards Tellus. “You are seeking Angeltech upgrades to your Lancer, Your Grace?”

“I... am,” he admitted. “The words of my fellow Dukes are unanimous on the benefits of the technology. Are you willing to administer those upgrades, Contessa?”

“Did they tell you the price of those upgrades, Your Grace?”

He sat back slightly in his seat. “These allegations of yours...”

“Are true,” I replied calmly. “They have been verified by the God in the Machine. Your Orders were forcibly suborned by the Emperor at the start of His Empire. Your elders did not join the Empire, Your Grace... they were enslaved by the Emperor. They had no choice in the matter, and that is still the case. The Fourteen Great Dukes of the Imperial Sector who have met the Emperor have all been treated the same way. Their loyalty to the Coronal Oath has been completely shifted to the Emperor.

“If you are invited to come before the Emperor, I suggest you get very busy and make excuses, or you will not be the same man walking out as you were going in. He was the greatest psion humanity ever produced, and you will not be able to resist Him, especially now that He is no longer Human.”

He shook, and seemed to age ten years. “He truly is a lich?” he had to gasp out.

“While the Emperor is powerful enough to ward away the active power of the God of the Machine, He cannot restrict Deus Machina’s awareness of technology. We won’t go into how He is slowly draining countless millions of humanity’s psionic Powered, its hopes for the future, for the purpose of establishing a Celestial Beacon for the Empire which is necessary only if you Helldive to travel, in essence eating up those who might rise to resist His rule... or be easily corrupted by the Warp or Mythos creatures, as they like to make you believe.

“The heart of the Celestial Beacon contains some of the purest death energy in all Creation, carefully vented from the soul-sucked, the dying, and His own emanations, and vented into the Warp.

“Do you know that vivic fire is barred from the Imperial Palace? If any of it were to touch the Imperial Beacon, it would shut the whole thing down, and might even explode it with the sheer sucking power of the negative energy there.

“The Emperor is the single biggest murderer of psionic talents that has ever existed, a spectre feasting on the psionic souls of humanity.

“He can end this invasion by the Six Princes right now. Today. He could bring the Warp Gods crashing down from their throne. HE CAN DO IT.

“But that would mean that HE has to die. Because that can only be done in the Warp. And He is perfectly willing to turn the Empire into a sky filled with corpses before He will admit that His way is wrong.”

“This... is very hard to believe, Contessa,” he managed to get out.

“That He is capable of doing that, or that He is unwilling to die to do it?” I replied calmly.

He didn’t know how to answer that.

“Nevertheless, you know my terms and my price. It has not changed. The Coronals and their Oath have been humanity’s greatest champions since before the Emperor founded His little study in galactic politics. Stay to your role, and leave saving the galaxy and human race to me.”

The weathered man opposite me took a deep breath, and slowly nodded. “My Chapter will neither help nor hinder your forces if the Empire chooses to wage war upon you, Contessa.”

“I will take the word of a Coronal. Pull into dock 10CBY. The upgrades will take approximately two weeks to put into place on your Lancer. Do you have personal technology that you wish upgraded as well?”

“Yes, Contessa,” he sighed gratefully.

“The only required financial remuneration we require is the E-Elements required to make what you will take away. Send me a full list of what you request, and I will give you the price. You can either pay cash and we can take the material from the exchanges, or you can supply it yourself, as you will.”

“Understood, Contessa, and thank you.”

“Your Grace.”

---

The holo winked out, and the engines of the Coronal ship flared and began to move.

The dock the ship was moving to was fairly isolated, and even if was sabotaged and detonated, the shields of Constella and the orbital ring could take the hit without a problem. There had been one Coronal ship sabotaged that way, which the Knights aboard had been rather unhappy to find out about.

They had been agog when I simply took their ship and gave them another Lancer, all ready to go. The refit crews had a fun time debugging the trapped one, and some two dozen Assassins, including a prominent Old Man, had died a couple weeks later on Rizmari III. The Rizmari Knights were still fighting in Rizmari space against a squadron of Warped invaders...

I wasn’t even in the same system, of course, but this kind of duty was easily done while I was coordinating more Xenosym extermination.

Flowerbush’s great-great-great grandkids were flying to the munch-munch attack all around me, as Blacklight Beamers reaped the weaker bioships, and coordinated fire breached the shells of the powerful ones so Dead Shots could detonate inside them, get life energy to spin at left angles, and render them into drifting fertilizer.

The Xenosym swarmfleets had been uncountable, spread across half the galactic plane, just endless numbers of them to calculate.

Their numbers ended up having endings, because the Canis Major swarmfleet was now reduced to half.

There were Strategos people who compiled all the numbers of floating fertilizer both here and active up in the galaxy, but the fact was that the swarmfleets spread out across thousands of light years were half-gone.

More to the point, there were no reinforcements coming from behind.

The Anti-Life were aware the Motherworlds of the Xenoswarms were dead. It was kind of hard to hide the explosive numbers of Gardeners feasting on them, and then swarming out into the stars.

There were several dozen swarmfleets moving between different worlds in the minor galaxies, scanning for biomatter, eating it if it accumulated, moving on. Those swarmfleets were naturally the preferred targets of a new generation of Gardeners.

We could assign the Gardeners tow ships, and Tachyon Bubbles mixed with Quantum Wind-sailing could shoot them between stars far faster than the Anti-Life could follow and catch them. If the Anti-Life parked on the Phlos, we could Gate them from one system to another, and completely bypass their hunter’s blockade.

If they got too close to a heliosphere, Flowerbush’s crack crew of celestial cauliflower could deploy a Sun Gun with astonishing speed, and King Rittercrun and the Unforgotten’s crew of Anti-Life killers were always happy to set up and wait for the kill shots.

That first Motherhive had been in a relatively small system with a weak heliosphere, and the Anti-Life had made the mistake of crowding in close to get a better look at what exactly had happened to one of their production centers. At that range, less than two light-hours out, the Sun Gun shots had actually been able to kill three of them, leaving Flowerbush’s cluster VERY satisfied.

As for the Black Compact fleet sent in, it didn’t know what hit it. Even a small and dying star was way more energy output than they could handle, and that much energy was also too much reality for any kind of dimensional shunting. They were reduced to energetic plasma, cooled off, and the solar furnaces on station in Canis Major had drifted in to process them.

The Gardeners were happy to provide us some fertilizer as well, after all. We could make more tugboats and Sun Gun components for them!