A few scanners, then a few dozen, then hundreds all quietly swept over the deathship Phaestos. Scanners going out could be sensed and their sources derived, especially with Rantha hair spread out with its sensory net on passive.

Whole sections of the debris in orbit that weren’t debris lit up with lots of lights. Calatia looked down at Ugivirm I below; once infected by the Warp, turning the people into fanatics, then Summoning in demons, it had been Omega Sanctioned via virus bombs and burning off the atmosphere.

She could see spectra beyond light, and there were glows down there of things at work. Lots of glows.

She couldn’t make a flaming track across the sky, so the orbital planetfall was going to be slower than usual, but that’s why she got paid the mega Karma.

She stayed onboard long enough to paint over a thousand ships drifting in orbit around the planet, hidden in the ruins of its orbital ring, and kicked off as her ride slid up to the decayed and fallen remnants of the ruptured primary docking station, there to start unloading its cargo.

She noticed well-maintained stations for a dozen more such vessels, two of them occupied, before she kicked off the Phaestos and dropped into a quickly-decaying orbit towards the planet below.

Interfacing with necrotech would be extremely unpleasant, but TL20 Tekron tech would have no problem doing so. Then they’d know this planet inside and out, and where to hit it to kill everything.

But that was a lot of ships in orbit...

--------

“I want those three hidden Vat factories taken off-line, and I want a 100% sure-kill True Death solution. Verify if they are true-Vatting or cloning, I believe they are doing the latter. Make sure you get the templates and gene-codes if so.”

Confirmations rippled back. Those hidden worlds pumping out their millions upon millions of bodies, used to form standard-issue mass undead and to power Deathjumping drives, would be gone within a week.

Sepulcher world after world slowly winked into existence on The Map. The scouts were very slowly and carefully scanning them, using Deathtech adapted from the Tekrons for sensing negative energy flows, and as such the presence of undead, basically ignoring any obstructions of the material universe in doing so.

Since they weren’t using energy fields to cloak themselves, merely remaining inanimate to minimize any coagulated flow of undead spirits, the death-hungry Tekron tech could pick them out from a very good distance, like a group of undead robots running on Death looking at either a bunch of leeches, or a bunch of rivals, depending on the point of view.

The least of the worlds had a fighting force equal to a full planetary population, i.e. over ten billion. They had ships equal to a Sector Fleet... or more, for systems more developed.

The whole Empire could rise in revolt, and the Emperor had enough undead muscle to put it all down...

There were only three such in Khagan Sector, as it was the most underdeveloped Sector, and hadn’t had the millennia of development to be leeched off of to form a true undead force.

------

The Warp forces were grinding in towards Tellus. Six of the Demon Princes his remaining kids had been made into were spearheading the effort, burning raging roads across the Imperial Sector that, without the support of the other Sectors the Empire had abandoned, they could not throw them back.

Ancient world after system after starfield fell in flaming ruin, but the forces of the Warp paid the price to do so, not that it deterred them. This was the greatest chance they would have to cut out the heart of the Empire, probably ever, and the xenosyms seemed to realize it as well. More and more feeding swarmfleets rose into the galaxy while the Warp’s attention was concentrated elsewhere, and there was no let-up in the apocalyptic war that was now going on.

The Ruk actually had few settled worlds, and the ones they did have were now vanished from the Warp, and had ominous formations around their Suns that could be used to sweep an invading Xenosym swarm from the system. As more and more Citadels began to move out, long-held mining systems went quiet... but when the Compact of the Black thought to invade, their ships vanished into the silence and a wink of a star, and the Ruk made no acknowledgement, claim, or counter that the Compact had ever been there at all...

-----

However, it was the last gasp of the Canid Major swarmfleet.

The Gardeners had never fed so well in all their galactic cycles of history, and their numbers had swelled as they ate. They were fully aware that there would be major changes in their life cycles once the xenosyms were gone... but this first swarmfleet was being eaten, there was no doubt about it.

The Anti-Life had come in openly, and tried to make a move on the forces preying on the Canid Major Swarm. They lost twelve of their number before they could adjust to the fact that the Human and Gardener forces doing this also had access to Dark Matter Singularity munitions, not just the Ruk... whose presence among those forces fighting the Sagittarius and Magellanic swarms was keeping the Anti-Life at careful distances.

The Xenosyms could not disobey their masters, and were Sundiving for system after system as fast as they could, hoping to evade the ravenous Gardeners being hauled across the Void to catch them in mid-transit... only to find the starflowers Gated into the systems they plunged into, waiting for them, to the terrified astonishment of the natives there, who could only watch in horror as the biovores went at one another with merciless hunger... and the Corunsun ships nearby merely sniped out bioships that tried to avoid the engagement, and told any local system fleets to keep a careful distance from the Gardeners, but shoot all the Xenosyms they liked.

The Gardeners really were the Corunsun’s allies!...

---------

I was no longer needed to run the murderous killing of the Canid Major swarmfleet. The Sources I’d helped Warlord up were taking over with implacable, Oath-driven focus, driving all these new rivers of destiny against the species. No, we wouldn’t be able to wipe them, as the galaxies were big places, with plenty of places for them to hide... not to mention the Compact could just succor them deep in space.

I felt the breaking point pretty cleanly, as a line of xenosyms that had once extended across thousands of light years was reduced to its last fifty swarms, all trying to form a massive overfleet and plunge for the heart of the Corunsun subsector.

They were not going to be happy when they ran into the Sun Gun waiting for them there. It didn’t matter how many there were, or how much they subdivided. Our tech was at a solid TL19 for that now, 20 with the Power Sources, and we could fire the sun repeatedly at multiple targets.

Not that the Gardeners wanted that to happen...

They were plunging to their doom, and I could Warlord it in the back of my head. The Dojo didn’t need to be there.

I made Twenty in Melee via Warlord as the Glory Award began to manifest. This last great struggle the Xenosym Swarm was putting up was already a foregone conclusion.

Anatolia was setting up temporary Sun Guns being deployed by Gardeners at system after system, and as the Xenosyms flooded in, they were wiped away with breathtaking speed. As this was now being witnessed by inhabited worlds, the information slowly got out, and rocked the galaxy.

A weapon system that could be put up in less than a day by the Gardeners, could reach the length of a star system and obliterate anything in its path, and then be torn down before it could be sabotaged, and sent off elsewhere?

Didn’t that make any defensive shielding moot? It could burn entire planets to husks easily. Once in place, the whole star system belonged to whoever commanded it!

And the person who commanded them was very, very obviously the Archduke Corunsun, and the Ruk... and, rumors had it, certain elements among the Elvar...

The Corunsuns had access to Gating technology, and could completely bypass travel times and system defenses to appear wherever they wanted to, barring Interdictions of truly massive scale. The Empire reeled when they heard of it.

Didn’t that mean they could invade any Imperial system at will? Appear behind any deployed Fleet, come in above a populated world before alarms could be raised and shields lifted to stop them?

How long had he had such tricks? Why hadn’t he deployed them before? With such massive military advantages, couldn’t he have swept the galaxy, obliterating any opposition or worlds before him?

And yet, he had not, save perhaps in passing. The only ones who were inheriting his unstinting wrath were fully on display. The Xenoswarms and their allies the Dark Compact, and the dark gods between the stars that they served, were the ones facing his might, and those of his allies.

Worlds that had been hesitant about truly rebelling, even in the face of the Empire’s abandonment, hit their tipping point as they realized the sheer power that the Corunsuns commanded truly was enough to defy the Empire, and started queueing up to join whatever government he was forming. Many of them didn’t like being demoted, but given the alternative, they stuck with it... and with Sources moving in to take over and do stuff with Charisma and destiny on their side, the waters of fate were moving.

Subsector after subsector capitulated to him, especially as Xenosym swarm after swarm was defeated. The map of the galaxy was being updated daily, and it was turning Corunsun Blue, White, and Gold.

But that wasn’t my job at the moment.

------

Deep in space, at a Screaming Star where a score of solar furnaces were still working day and night to digest many thousands of ships yet to go, I was guiding the refit of the Dojo.

Dark finish was swapped out for white and gold. This was not a ship that could be concealed with what I was doing, so why do it? No, what I was doing was full Angeltech from stem to stern... and as the kinks were being worked out, hulls and frames fresh from the smelters and forges were getting components printed off and installed.

Nothing subtle about these ships. They were going to stand out anywhere, because they had to stand out, to do what they were meant to do.

Our Black Fleet of Reaper ships was designed to kill biovores, and we had spent years perfecting the technology to do that, to a limit organic tech simply could not replicate or resist. Ronnie and the Fantastics were Majors in Deathtech via their Curseline, and everything the Emperor was doing was within their understanding. They’d worked out all the tech trees and advances, and were designing defenses against them and everything.

Being Major in Death automatically made them Anathemic in Light and Life, much to their dismay. Their Major Moon offset some of it, but they were basically inferior to normal Ranthas in those tech lines once past TL10.

It hadn’t been important, because we weren’t trying to mess with TL17+ genetics, and were using Fire instead of Light, and weren’t trying to mess with creation of souls and things like that. But with the Emperor potentially having up to TL20 Deathtech, too, it was time to flex our versatility.

That meant I was now taking lead in development of anti-undead Light and Life technology. More to the point, Good/Holy Light and Life technology.

THE Light-tech. Literal Angeltech, harnessing the Light of Creation, of Heaven itself.

This was not something that could be hidden or cloaked, and likewise wasn’t something that was all that useful against the living. It would be useful against the Warp, as all Holy powers were... but it was simply going to tear the undead of the Emperor a new one.

I had been running the research for this out of the back of my head, the kids providing the hands and the tools, slowly amping it up as pretty much everyone was certain that a tech tree the Fantastics couldn’t jump in on was going to turn out to be pretty important, and so we’d never stopped our research on it. Exactly one Curseline, Illuminated, had a Neutral affiliation with both, instead of Esoteric, and naturally enough the Elvar proved to be quite useful... both after the Sunhawk joined, and via the rare vessel we salvaged from the Sargasso for study.

We had a Black Fleet, and now we were building a White one, very quickly, indeed...