Sunny Briggs was the Illuminated Curseline progenitor, a cheerful and outgoing son of mine with a big smile, bigger heart, and a really strong motivation to bring The Light to the galaxy, preferably by shining it into the heart of the Warp and burning away a lot of the shit there.

He’d been driving his Expert Levels ever higher for years, talked with the Light and Life-biased Gardeners all the time, was admired by the Elvar for his fairly quick understanding of Light (only at -3, instead of -5 like the rest of us, vs the Elvar’s -2), and knew he had to get to Twenty to unlock the highest tier of Phototech and get his much-desired Whitelight Beamers to match the Blacklight Beamers on the opposite side of the coin.

He had reached Twenty about five years ago, working on the final iterations of the TL20 Sun Gun and Solar Wards, providing the lynchpin harmonic tech that popped them to full TL20 with the help of the Hot Stuff and Pyromaniac Curselines and their Major Fire Affiliation on the other side (replacing the Water the rest of us had). The Sun Gun at TL20 required Earth, Fire, Water, and Light tech to reach that high, requiring a lot of harmonizing, several Curselines, and a lot of weird Talents to get where it was.

I had contributed a lot on the Water/redirecting energy side of things, but we hadn’t been able to make that last step until Sunny hit Twenty, could do TL17 on the Light side, understand the apex Phototech, and applied it to the rest of what we were doing.

The Fleet we had quietly been building was designed first as an anti-Possessed ship attack craft, capable of ripping through anything that was so soundly empowered by the Warp with considerable speed, punishing them for taking tech shortcuts with Warp Sorcery.

Retasking them for undead slaughter duty wasn’t going to be nearly so tough, although this was going to use up a lot of our higher-end E-Elements very quickly.

The psions at all levels were saying we had less than three months before the situation in the Imperial Sector reached a tipping point, and then something momentously bad was going to happen.

I guess it was time to blow the damn predictions out of the water again.

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The Emperor knew we could Gate, and he knew we had FTL.

We were reasonably sure at least some of his ships had Inertialess drive, since using Deathtech was one of the easier ways of reaching that. The undead ships probably only accessed the Warp because that was what the living human ships were doing.

It was hard to confirm without actually going into the drives of one of the ships, so we simply proceeded as if that was the truth. In any event, it was still going to be subject to mass shadows and Jamming speed, because Magical Universe didn’t care about your FTL when it was time to have explosive close-range fun with volatile munitions.

Sensing a dimension-crossing like a Gate opening was a bit different than someone ripping open a portal for a Hellride, and naturally you needed to have sensors calibrated for the different kinds of things. Too, Hellportals spilled out a lot of energy when they opened, whereas Gates intrinsically kept the two sides separated as they crossed, so the TL to sense them was much higher... and Deathtech wasn’t really made for sensing stuff that didn’t actually deal with life energies, like touching the Warp did.

The Harmonic Drive didn’t really shed much energy, kinda like inertialess that way. Inertialess could be deuced hard to track.

Ergo, he might be able to set things up on some of his older Forgeworlds with older Water-tech everyone else had forgotten about was sitting around, but his sixty-seven Sepulcher worlds and nineteen Tombworlds of extra Cloned Undead troopers? Not a chance. He might have been able to deliver individual tech himself, if he was willing to leave the Celestial Beacon... which would alert everyone and their mother, including me, that he was actually taking action.

The galactic undead apocalypse had to end now. Inertialess drive meant ability to move fleets with impunity here and there, just like we enjoyed with the Corunsuns, able to whelm and disperse faster than lower TL ships could possibly respond to.

The Emperor would wipe the galaxy clean, meaning every single race. Whether he’d leave any of humanity alive was a toss-up... can’t increase your undead armies without the living making babies, although he certainly didn’t need them educated now, did he?

So, we had to take all these places out, we had to do so virtually simultaneously, and we had to do it very effectively.

Since the Emperor didn’t have the galaxy-wide communication channel that we did, we still had one up on him. Coordinating this was actually not all that hard.

Our infiltrators had gotten close enough to see that many of the weapons were based on Tekron channels, specifically designed to kill living beings and ships using the Elemental tech lines. A fight between two Deathships would be a long, slow slogging affair, but one of them could hit even a Ruk Citadel with a punch several times its own size. A Fleet of them could wear one right out, eroding away the mountain and exposing the weak points to flood with negative energy and kill the living within.

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The Dojo dumped its capapsitors, and the Gate opened in front of us. Already under a good head of diverted gravity-compressed unicosmic energies from the White Hole Core, we sailed on through it with no fuss, started recharging the capapsitor for future surprises, and as the onboard squadrons were Storm-launched as mass units, the equally important Storm-launches of Halo missiles were rail-launched as fast as they could go.

The MF Gunboats being deployed had their own racks of Halo missiles to launch as they scattered in all directions, and The Tactical Map all around us lit up in my head and on filtered holo in several aspects for the trackers on the bridge to live through.

“Whitelight Beamers on! Initiate Omega Sanction!”

The Whitelight Beamers were already in place, and the White Hole Core was at maximum power. Transcendent Runes, psi-powers, vivic fire, Holy Blessings, Undead banefire, and Phototech all the way up the scale poured into the Beamers, and began to paint the planet below.

Byrd Rantha and Cook Briggs had tumbled in Utter Stealth Mode in orbit around the planet, painting ship after ship after ship waiting around the planet and their locations. They had emphatically confirmed that there had been no alterations of positions as we came in, although there had been subtle changes in the Death Furnaces running the ships, indicating that they were readying the ships for deployment.

The Gunboats Riftcut, instantly scattering all around the planet, and even as the loads from the Dojo were covering a massive arc, the supplementary loads from the Gunboats were closing all the holes in air and sky.

In the meantime, an Ectoplasmic Ghost Touch beam of The Light was raging down from on high, passing completely through any matter on the way as it did. Normal matter barely acknowledged its presence, but any negatively-charged matter? That stuff ignited like tinder.

Like a computer forming a video image in slow motion, the Beamers painted Light across and through the ether of the planet. Radiant Light filled the sky, four conjoined sunbeams going off and plunging through all material defenses as they lashed back and forth across the hemisphere in precise, pre-calculated arcs.

There were massive vivic detonations down on the surface. Calatia certainly hadn’t been idle, painting all their primary Shield generators for us, as well as hacking a nice and vital thirty-second delay into them powering up once they sensed an incursion.

That was more than enough time for a Halo missile to come down and set off the prettiest Sunburst Nukes of Radiant Fire you ever saw.

The planet was crawling with black and green negative energies, but lines of white were blazing across it as the Beamers ignited everything. The remnant of an atmosphere was on vivic fire, The Light was shining straight through uncounted numbers of subterranean storage vaults, buried barracks, hidden hangars, and pulsing armories, and The Light, Banefire, and Vivus were getting everywhere.

As for the orbiting ships, they had their own problems.

A good portion of them did manage to get up their secondary Shields in time for the Halo missiles, but it didn’t do them much good. Powered by negative energy, the hard Light of the Halo corona fields slid through them like a hot knife through butter, and rammed into the negatively-charged hulls. Positive and negative energies blew apart just like anti-matter, and Light Thorium detonated in a nice handy swathe towards the Death Furnace on each ship.

The Ruk, who LOVED thorium, particularly enjoyed the show.

The deathships were Imperial Standard design, and had simply switched out the primary power core of standard fusion or antimatter spec for the Death Furnace. We knew those ships designs, where to hit them, and very specifically, what to hit them with.

Introducing vivic fire nodules to exploding negative energy is happy times for undead.

The flower of orbital planetary destruction rang out in every direction as the Death Ships blew... not with the explosive detonation of an atomic or quantum-powered detonation, but with the guttering roar of vivic fire igniting and following that negative energy surge in all directions.

Every seam and crack in those ships jetted out vivic fire under massive compression, eroding nega-charged hulls away like sand before water, and in every direction, vivus feasted.

We didn’t have two ships to spare for each world, but we had enough missiles to make sure the city shields couldn’t get up before the Beamers could sweep half-mile-wide columns of annihilation across the planet, and set everything on vivic fire.

The orbital ring was on vivic fire, holed in a hundred places, and massive explosions of The Light blooming through from within it. A thousand starpoints of light from burning Death Ships floating among the rubble and wrack above the planet around it supplemented everything.

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It took the Dojo an hour to paint the entire planet, circling the globe to finish the task. Every inch of the planet was literally bathed in The Light, but the ghostly power had no ability to affect material, living things at all... only things with a negative energy or multi-planar existence.

Oh, yeah, we weren’t ignoring the possibility of ghostly hordes of enslaved undead spirits, either. After all, there were some Undead Hazard Zones the Bonescythes had stumbled across that were marked for extreme danger, and yet held not a single one of the damned spirits that were supposed to be there, at all...

All that vivus had the extra effect of making space nearby incredibly tough, meaning missing ships out Collecting wouldn’t be able to Helljump in on top of us, either.

Had they worked out the extremes of inertialess combat? Did they know we’d been working on the combat scenarios for that kind of fighting for literally decades? Had they run the simulations of what happens when a negatively-powered Shield around an inertialess ship held in place by TL 20 tractor beam gets sandwiched between Halo missiles Sunbursting around them?

“Tachyon wave fluxes incoming!” Shia-Kol, granddaughter of the Dojo’s first communications officer, sang out on Divs. Coordinates were input, vectors... inertialess ships still displaced matter as they moved, and needed some immensely strong material shields to do so when moving at FTL. The sloughed matter naturally built up and created streams of density that changed how neutrinos spread, which changed tachyon bounces.

We were literally tracking them from a second or two behind them, but that was fine.

Tractor beams flashed out across the void. A second later, like it had teleported out of nowhere, a ship appeared, just like that, just the faintest wash of super-compressed atoms from millions of miles of vacuum scattering before it, caught in place by matter-grabbing Earth tech that didn’t care what was leaking out of it.

The Halo missiles bracketed it. The explosions, even of light, should just have bounced the massless thing away, little more than a momentary interruption of control. Alas, they hit those negatively-charged meteor shields, so good for swatting interruptive matter out of the way, and were now nice conduits down into the ship as they became the anti-energy feeds leading into the heart of the vessel.