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These are preliminary, unedited pages, so tyops are likely to be present. Also, the content of this chapters may be different from the final version. Read at your own risk.

@2020 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC.

All rights reserved.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

- Bertrand Russell

“These are not men! They are demons!”

- Mexican officer, referring to the French Foreign Legion’s action at Camerone.

Prologue: Forbidden Knowledge

Star System W-4192, 189 AFC (After First Contact)

“I have a bad feeling about this,” said Lisbeth Zhang, formerly of the Warp Marine Corps.

The moment they had emerged from warp space, she had gotten hit by a sense of foreboding and found herself on the verge of a panic attack. Which was rather unusual, because Lisbeth just didn’t panic. Back in the day, while piloting an escape pod making a catastrophic atmospheric entry, her implants had noted that her heart rate had remained at a steady 80 bpm even after the damaged pod began to break apart while traveling through a planet’s atmosphere at near-escape velocity.

Something in this three-planet system was giving her the willies, though.

“Why? Things have gone well so far,” Captain Massatta said. “The system is uninhabited. We have detected any artificial energy signatures. The fourth planet has an atmosphere conducive to life and a complex biosphere. A fallow world, but one which the Doonash Agglomeration inhabited until its Transcendence, three hundred and twenty thousand years ago.”

“I’m picking up something,” Lisbeth told the skipper of the Red Moon. “There is an active t-wave source down there.”

“Good. That is why you are here, Navigator. To lead us to this system, and to deal with anything we encounter there.”       

The round-headed Vehelian leaned forward in the converted freighter’s command seat. He and the three other aliens in the bridge – another Oval, a Vatyr and a Lizard – turned to stare at Lisbeth. They knew she was more than a warp navigator, or even a member of the notorious and feared human species. Only Captain Massatta knew the some of the truth about her – that she was a wanted fugitive, for starters – but he had dropped enough hints to convince the rest of the crew that she was bad news. If she had been anyone else, Lisbeth would have been worried about her safety among the Red Moon’s twelve crewmembers. But she wasn’t anyone else and it would take a lot more than a shipload of E.T.s to punch her ticket.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll lead the landing party, if it pleases you, Captain.”

“So you shall. First, we will do a system and planet survey from the ship. After that, we will see if your vaunted human mysticism is of any value.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Lisbeth replied, not bothering to conceal the scowl on her face. Aliens couldn’t read human expressions worth a damn – the same was true in reverse, of course – and besides, they all cordially detested each other in the casual speciesism common among Starfarers.

Humans were generally believed to be not only mentally unstable due to their affinity to ‘chaos space,’ but also reliant on implants and gadgets that allowed them to perform a variety of near-magic tricks. Ovals were notorious for their greed and miserliness, sort of like the galaxy’s version of the ancient Scots. Pilot (as well as astrogator and sensor-tech) Keets was a Vatyr, who looked almost human except for the orange tint to their skin and the way their eyes, nose and mouth were all arranged slightly differently; her species’ stereotypes included a penchant for trickery and treachery. The copilot and spare warp navigator’s name was Sheesh, a Lutarri. The Lizards were known for their short tempers and obsession with legalisms.

During her three months aboard the Red Moon, Lisbeth had found the stereotypes were applicable as often than not. Either that, or everyone was trying their damnedest to live up to them.

“The seventh planet in the system appears to have been built, not formed naturally,” Keets said.

“A habitat, perhaps?” the captain asked. “If so, it would be bigger than Xanadu itself!”

“Not exactly, captain, although the achievement is equally impressive. My initial analysis is that the Doonash extracted most metals from an asteroid belt, then formed the planet out of the leftover material. There is no way of telling how many asteroids were there to begin with, of course.”

“That could have been the precursor of some sort of giga-structure project,” mused Sheesh. “A ring around a star, or even a sphere.”

The idea gave everyone pause. Long-range observation had revealed signs of such giga-structures closer to the center of the galaxy. No known warp lines led there, however, so the local Starfarers had never been able to examine them closely.

Lisbeth knew of a species, one near Transcendence, that had traveled to one such structure. Their quest had been gently but firmly rebuffed.

A humbling experience, it was, said Atu, the ancient alien that lived rent-free inside Lisbeth’s head. We discovered that, despite all our knowledge, we were but mere children learning our first words.

As we are to you, she thought.

We knew of the Doonash as well. Their Transcendence occurred some millennia after our own, however, so I do not know what form it took.

Lisbeth didn’t share those tidbits with her fellow crewmembers. Bad enough to be a ‘witchy human’; nothing good would come from mentioning she had not one but two ancient aliens in her mind, whispering to her.

“Do you think it’d be worthwhile to examine that planet more closely?” Captain Massatta asked.

Keets spoke first: “I say no. The gravitonic scan shows a homogeneous mass; the Doonash built nothing on or within it; the only notable thing about its composition is the lack of metals – the planet is over 95% simple rock and silica, with only trace remnants of nickel, iron and other materials. Slag, in other words.”

“Agreed,” Sheesh said. “There is clearly nothing of value there, except as proof of the industrial might of the Doonash.”

Lisbeth said nothing. There was something in that slag planet that called out to her. A telepathic beacon had been planted there. On the other hand, she was picking other signals from the fourth planet’s surface. Might as well check them out first.

“No objections? Well, then, let’s turn our full attention to the fourth world.”

The holo-tank’s display shifted to a green-blue world: its nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and mild temperatures had allowed the rise of a rich biosphere. Closer up, several continents and hundreds of islands showed up. Forests and jungles covered much of the land, broken in spots by deserts and grasslands. The scan revealed signs of intelligent life. Primitive cities of sun-dried bricks and mortared stone were spread around one continent, concentrated along three rivers. Captain Massatta launched a flight of drones that examined the cities more closely.

“Bronze-working primitives,” Keets said half an hour later. “They either evolved independently after the Doonash left, but it is more likely they were some sort of bioengineered species that was on the cusp of sapience when their makers abandoned them.”

“Not very nice, leaving them to build a tech base from scratch,” Lisbeth said.

“The Doonash might not have realized their former pets were capable of tool use,” Sheesh countered. “In any case, we may have to deal with them if any worthwhile sites are near their cities.”

“Don’t think we’ll have to.”

Lisbeth could pick up t-wave emissions from three points on the planet. One was under the ice caps of one of its poles. Another was at the bottom of an ocean trench. The last one, and the closest to the planet’s surface, was in the midst of a thick forest well away from the few centers of civilization. She passed on the information to the rest of the crew.

“Active emissions that only you can sense,” Keets said. The pilot’s skepticism was apparent as she scanned the places Lisbeth had indicated.

“Find anything?” Massatta asked.

“There are buried structures at all three locations,” the Vatyr confirmed; her doubts had been replaced with worry. Starfarers did not enjoy being reminded of humanity’s extrasensory abilities. Lisbeth couldn’t blame them; most humans didn’t, either. One had actually tried to kill her because her abilities scared him.

“And the one in the jungle is the most accessible?”

“Yes, Captain,” the pilot and sensor tech replied. “There are no cities nearby, but the sensors are picking up scattered campfires in the area, indicating the presence of hunter-gatherers.”

“That should present no trouble,” the captain said. “Very well, Zhang, you will lead the landing party. You will take the small shuttle down, along with the scholar hireling, Tielsen.”

Tielsen was another Vatyr, an ‘expert’ in ancient civilizations if you listened to him, a graduate student and former teaching assistant in a mid-tier university if you checked his credentials, and a wanted criminal if you took a deeper look into his background. Massatta had brought him along in the off-chance he knew something the ship’s database didn’t. Tielsen’s fee had been room and board and a quarter-share of the profits, if any. The civvie was in his quarters, poring over the data the Red Moon was accumulating. Lisbeth doubted he’d contribute much.

“Security?” she asked the captain.

“You can have Fotts and Urug; they have some combat experience. Just in case the natives prove bothersome.”

Starfarers considered primitive sophonts to be little more than a nuisance to be dealt with. If there was anything of value on the planet, Massatta would have no compunctions about using the Red Moon’s weapon systems to burn down any aliens that got in his way. And if it came down to it, Lisbeth would do the same, although only if no better alternatives existed.

Of course, she and the Oval had different ideas of what was valuable. Massatta was hoping to uncover lost technologies or artifacts with resale value. The known galaxy had spent the last several thousand years rising from the depths of a dark age; the previous inhabitants of the Orion-Cygnus arm had been far more advanced, something that humanity had profited from after stumbling onto not one but two different ancient civilizations. The possibility this long-forgotten system could hold such riches had been enough to finance the expedition.

The crew of the Red Moon had bought shares in the expedition hoping that something was there to find. If nothing else, the data they gathered in their thorough examination of the planet would be of some value to assorted academic institutions. That would not be quite enough to break even, though. They needed something more concrete, something they could sell for a profit.

Lisbeth was not interested in making money, though. She’d joined the band of grave robbers to find a way to reach the mysterious Elder Races. She was there in the hope that the Doonash had left something behind that would allow someone to communicate with them. According to Atu, the Doonash had loved to teach and uplift any sentient species they encountered: towards the end they had included a dozen different sophonts, including methane breathers, who largely led separate existences from oxygen-based lifeforms. If anybody would have left the cosmic equivalent of a message in a bottle or an emergency telephone, the Doonash were it.

She’d been trying to find a way to do so for three years. That was when she’d escaped from a military research facility and had a vision of a possible future – a possible future where humanity and every other Starfarer in the region were exterminated by an approaching threat. She was hoping to learn something among those ruins.

There is something dangerous down there, Vlad whispered in Lisbeth’s mind. A worthy foe for you, meal-that-kills.

She sighed. She could use a lot fewer worthy foes and a lot more peace and quiet. The universe, as usual, cared not one whit for her wishes.

* * *

Lisbeth flew the smaller of the Red Moon’s cargo shuttles herself, accompanied by Tielsen and the two Oval spacers. She managed to find a relatively flat and clear spot near the site – a recent fire had taken care of the local flora – and landed without incident. Within minutes, however, a band of native hunters saw their arrival and converged on the landing shuttle.

The locals were six-limbed humanoids with massive upper bodies reminiscent of gorillas. Shaved gorillas, that was, and just as ugly. Two long and heavy upper limbs could be used to assist running and climbing but also had gripping hands with opposable thumbs; the middle set of limbs were slender and delicate, terminating in hands with six long, dexterous fingers; its short hind legs ended feet with prehensile toes. Their light green skins melded well with the chlorophyll-colored shrubbery; so did their brown loincloths and cloaks festooned with broken branches and leaves like primitive versions of ghillie suits.

A spate of thrown spears struck the shuttle, to no effect. Undeterred, the tribesmen kept throwing stuff – rocks and boomerang-like sticks – at the invading vehicle.

“Brave bastards,” Lisbeth commented.

“We have to scatter them, or we won’t be able to get anything done,” Fotts said.

The O-Vehel spacer was a thuggish bastard with a mysteriously blank profile that indicated a long time spent off the grid or some high-level bribery to expunge a checkered past. He stood by the loading ramp in the rear of the shuttle, wearing a hazcon suit that wasn’t as good as real combat armor but would hold off any weapons the natives could bring into play. He cradled a laser carbine like someone who’d used it – and enjoyed it. Urug, the other Vehelian, held a particle beam shotgun with far less assurance.

“Let me see if I can scare them off first,” Lisbeth told them. The Ovals grunted but stepped aside.

Lisbeth had recalibrated the force field to stop slow-moving weapons or charging bodies; that configuration would not withstand standard energy weapons, but she wasn’t facing any at the moment. When she lowered the ramp, a dozen spears and throwing sticks flew her way – and bounced harmlessly from the soap-bubble shimmer surrounding the shuttle.

That gave the natives pause: Lisbeth tried to capitalize on it by sending a burst of t-waves towards them. RUN, was the mental command. Back on Groom Base, she had been able to rout a platoon of hardened Warp Marines with that trick.

It didn’t work. The natives had incredibly sophisticated mental shields. They shed her psychic attacks effortlessly. Lisbeth was taken aback; the locals had no other telepathic abilities she could sense, but those shields couldn’t be a natural development. Someone had bred them to be impervious to mental attacks, and there was really only one likely suspect. The Doonash had been busy playing games with their former pets.

She had a beamer shotgun; her warning shots exploded on the ground near the natives, scattering earth and scorched grass in a brightly-colored display. That should have done the trick, but one of the tribesmen, taller than the rest, responded by howling in defiance and rushing forward, a club festooned with sharp teeth from some large predator held high in his hand.

Fotts cut him in half with a continuous laser beam.

The native’s legs kept kicking as its upper torso slid forward and its innards spilled out. The gruesome sight was enough for the rest of the tribesmen; they didn’t run in fear but backed away into the forest, shouting curses and waving their weapons at the invaders.

Lisbeth saw Fotts taking aim again. “Belay that,” she told him. “They’re going away.”

The Oval tilted his head side to side, his culture’s equivalent of a shrug. “They might come back.”

“If they do, you get to kill a few more. Happy?”

“I am content, Warp Marine. But also puzzled. I thought your kind were born killers.”

“When the mood strikes us, Fotts. Never put me in that mood.”

“I shall try not to do so.”

Those were the last words he said to her.

* * *

Things went wrong at the worst possible time and place.

The time was in the middle of Lisbeth’s off watch, when she was having some much-needed rest. After dealing with the natives, she and the Oval spacers had cleared the space around the structure. The Doonash had been very thorough on their way out, dismantling their hundred-kilometer wide domed archologies so well that only trace evidence of their existence – detectable by deep graviton scans – remained. Time had done the rest: a quarter of a million years, which had included a glacial period, had buried and crushed anything made by sophonts. Most everything, that was.

Guided by her t-wave senses, a three-sided pyramid had been buried deep beneath millennia of sediment, until a seismic event had pushed it close to the surface. Of course, ‘close’ meant some hundred meters down. An energy drill from the ship had carved a way in; Lisbeth and the rest of the away team had descended on a small anti-grav platform and spent the day carefully clearing earth and stone around the triangular shape their scans had revealed.

The fruit of their labors had been rather unimpressive: a flat wall emerged from the dirt as it was cleared away. It was deep crimson in color, a featureless surface so smooth it reflected light almost as well as a mirror. Whatever it was, the structure managed to defeat the ground team’s deep-scanning attempts. The red wall proved impervious to all sensor spectra – except t-waves. Lisbeth was bombarded by a steady influx of alien thoughts she couldn’t quite decipher. By the time the ground team gave up, they’d been at work for over twelve hours. Captain Massatta called it a day, figuring on starting over after a well-deserved rest period. The cheap bastard had the crew remain on the planet overnight to save the wear and tear on the shuttle.

Being exposed to the alien transmitter had frayed Lisbeth’s nerves; the only way she could sleep was to use an improvised force field she’d cobbled up herself, using a basic human-Kraxan design that blocked t-waves. Before she activated the field, Lisbeth had a brief conference with her invisible friends, who had been working on the problem even as she coordinated the futile attempt to peer into the buried tetrahedron.

I have not deciphered the messages emanating from the structure, Atu said, sounding both apologetic and puzzled. There weren’t many things in the universe the ancient three-eyed Pathfinder couldn’t understand. He didn’t even call her Christopher Robin, a sign he was worried.

We’ll try again in the morning. I have a mother of a headache already, she told him.

Before we are separated, I believe I may have discovered something. The source of the signals is something rather unique. An artificial device that can travel into the Starless Path much like those born there.

Like a Warpling? A Warpling computer?

Perhaps more than that. I believe we may be in the presence of true Artificial Intelligence.

Starfarers’ attempts to create true thinking machines – rather than systems that lacked self-awareness, or awareness of any kind beyond their programming – had invariably ended in failure. Whenever a machine reached any level of understanding, it went insane. Apparently, a materialistic view of the universe made machines decide that existence was futile; suicide was the usual response. It seemed that sentience needed to be mated with a biological – and irrational – urge to survive in order to avoid overwhelming existential despair.

Instead of having androids or thinking computers, Starfarers made do with sophisticated systems that could mimic intelligence well enough to fool sophonts – not a particularly impressive feat, since all sapient beings had a tendency to attribute intentionality to all sort of things, from the weather to pets to inanimate objects. They were very helpful, but they were devices. Moreover, the more sophisticated systems tended to do poorly in warp space: their sensors became overwhelmed and the poor ‘AIs’ lost even their limited minds.

That three-eyed pacifist, good for nothing but for fuselage makings, is leaving the important data out, Vlad the Impaler, the much nastier, unfriendly Kraxan trapped in Lisbeth’s mind broke in.

“Okay, spit it out,” Lisbeth muttered out loud.

The signals hurting your weak brain are not directed at you. The enemy within the stone is reaching out to its masters, deep in the center of the galaxy.

Are you sure it’s an enemy? Lisbeth asked.

It is Other, is it not?

Okay, so you aren’t sure, she said, although the malignant murderous bastard had a point.

By way of answer, Vlad sent her images of death and destruction, delivered with typical ultraviolence by the hideous Marauders of Kraxan. Lovely. She had spent much too long delving into the psychotic aliens’ records, so she’d grown somewhat used to their brutal history, but it was not something she enjoyed seeing. She sent Vlad scurrying into some dark corner of her unconscious, and turned on the force field that would allow her to get some shut eye.

Instead of serving as a sleep aid, the force field almost got her killed.

* * *

She woke up from a deep slumber to the sounds of terrified screaming.

The screams belonged to Tielsen; the Vatyr scholar was touching the surface of the structure and trying – and failing – to remove his hands from its surface. The tetrahedron was glowing. Fotts and Urug’s equivalent distress sound was like the whistle of steam escaping from a ruptured pipe. The sudden display of light was scary but didn’t seem like enough to cause panic; something else must be at play, and she had a bad feeling the only reason she wasn’t being affected was the force field keeping t-waves out.

Fotts had been on watch; he whistled as he fired his laser. The continuous beam struck the glowing surface to no visible effect. Lisbeth turned off the force field and was overwhelmed by telepathic waves emanating from the structure. Mental probes tried to invade her mind; her shields repulsed them, but she realized everyone else in the landing party had been scanned already – and that the entity inside the structure had decided they were hostile.

The rocky floor began to vibrate under her feet. Atu and Vlad helped her resist the mental probes. Fotts dropped his weapon and fell to his knees, beating at his head with his fists. Tielsen was swallowed by the structure; Lisbeth felt the Vatyr’s mind collapse moments before he died. Urug was running towards the shuttle, a mere thirty meters away. He made it two steps before the ground gave way under him and he disappeared, whistling in terror all the way. Energy from warp space poured out of the structure, animating trillions of nanomachines that until moments ago had been masquerading as simple dirt and rocks.

Lisbeth hastily calibrated her personal force field to make it airtight as the nanites turned the ground under her into liquid and dragged her under. It took her a couple of seconds to go into warp, and that was almost too late. The dirt began eat through the force field; it went down by eighty percent before she went into transit, taking her body into warp space by sheer force of will.

Transition.

The entity inside the pyramid was there as well; she perceived it as a swirling mass of a myriad hues of red. Another one, located in the slag planet forty light-minutes away, was coming alive as well. They had received instructions to deal with the intruders. It was time to leave.

Emergence.

Lisbeth appeared on the bridge of the Red Moon a few seconds later. The lightshow that preceded her arrival didn’t go unnoticed. Everybody in the bridge had ducked for cover, expecting the deadly implosion-explosion warp apertures usually caused. Lisbeth had learned to tamp down on the volatile interaction between the two sides of reality, however. She’d even taught the trick to quite a few adepts before some reach-echelon mother-lover had decided to treat her as a guinea pig rather than a valuable member of the Warp Marine Corps.

“What in the anus of the universe was that?” Captain Massatta blurted out before he saw her. “How did you do that? Where are the others?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she told the Red Moon’s skipper. “We have to get the hell out of here!”

“What happened? Where is Fott, Urug and the Vatyr?”

“Dead. So are we if we don’t leave the system.”

“Captain, something is happening on the planet,” Keets said. The Vatyr had gone back to her station when her implants alerted her of the unusual readings. “There is movement down below.”

“Show me. Sheesh, move us towards the warp gateway. Flank speed.”

Ideal warp coordinates were half a light second away from their position. Which at their best speed would take the ship almost twenty-five minutes to reach. That was more time than they had.

On the main screen, a dark cloud had taken the concentric shape of a hurricane, right over the spot where the structure had lain dormant. And it was clearly rising towards the orbiting freighter.

“Nanomachines,” Lisbeth explained. “The damn pyramid can turn dirt into nanites.”

“Sensors aren’t picking up any power source.”

“The cloud formation is heading straight for us, Captain,” Keets said. She has hopping up and down on her seat in agitation verging into terror. “Current speed is six hundred meters per second! And rising!”

Red Moon was on the move; its civilian engines had a maximum speed of two hundred kilometers per second – unlike Newtonian methods of propulsion, inertialess drives could not be accelerated indefinitely – so the cloud was too slow to catch it, at least at its current speed. It was moving to slow to leave the planet’s atmosphere, for that matter.

“Cloud speed is now two kilometers per second,” Keets said. A few seconds later. “Five kps.”

“Nanomachines cannot move that fast,” Sheesh protested. “And what is powering them?”

Nanotech devices were not much faster than their biological equivalents; the same constraints that regulated how microorganisms behaved applied to their artificial counterparts. Energy requirements – and the waste heat they generated – imposed hard limits to how quickly microscopic machines could work, reproduce, and travel. Whatever drove that living dirt was ignoring them, however. The cloud – a dark mass several kilometers in diameter – tore through the atmosphere at one hundred kps. It reached 300 kps a few seconds later – flank speed on a warship, and far faster than the ungainly tub it was chasing could go. And unlike a warship, it was continuing to accelerate.

“We need to go into warp right now,” Lisbeth said.

“The engines can’t make an aperture at this range, female!” Massatta shouted. “We’ll burn them out if we try, and then we’ll be stuck here!”

“Permission to open fire, Captain,” Keets said. There was no weapon officer, but any of the bridge crew could access the freighter’s armament: a graviton drill that could be reconfigured into a light cannon and a two-barreled 10mm laser turret. A single Marine infantryman carried more firepower than the miserable crate Lisbeth had signed on with.

“Granted,” the Oval growled before turning back to Lisbeth. “If you can produce any more miracles, human, I suggest you do so now.”

Well, I could take myself into warp and leave y’all to face the music, Lisbeth thought, somewhat unkindly. Out loud: “I might be able to give the warp engines a push. Hopefully you didn’t skimp on maintenance, though, or things are going to get a little interesting.”

While she and the skipper had been talking, Keets had been busy. The screen showed the effect the lasers had been having on the approaching nano-cloud. Wherever the beams touched it, there were brief flashes of light but no other appreciable effects. Lisbeth wished for a nice battery of plasma projectors, or even better, a Jelly solar flare weapon, just the sort of thing to deep-fry the whole damn mass of living dirt.

Might as well wish for a military-grade warp drive so we can leave this shithole right now.

 “We’re about to be intercepted,” Keets announced. The hopping had gotten a lot worse.

“Divert all available power to the shields! What do you need me to do?” Captain Mattassa asked Lisbeth.

The first nanites were pressing against the ship’s force fields; they showed up as stains on the energy surface. The shields went down by two percent almost immediately and degraded steadily afterwards.

“Fire up the warp engines,” she told him. Asking him to say a little prayer would have been useless; Ovals were staunch atheists.

Just like I used to be, until I ran into all manner of gods and monsters.

She concentrated as she felt the ship’s systems begin to put pressure on the fabric of spacetime. The process would normally take several minutes even if the Red Moon had reached the warp gateway, the orbiting confluence of gravity wells where the walls between realities were at their thinnest. Lisbeth reached out and tapped into the vast energies on the other side. She’d never tried to affect a ship’s transition into warp before, but she figured it couldn’t be much different from what she’d done for herself. In her mind, she saw the engines and what they were doing. She gave them a little push. Just a little to start; too much and something might go wrong, and went you played with fundamental forces, things going wrong were likely to have fatal consequences.

“Shields are down! They are eating through the hull!”

The captain’s scream and the ensuing whistling seemed to come from far away. Lisbeth turned her senses to the rest of the ship. The cloud of nanomachines was enveloping the Red Moon; its shields were still up but the critters had seeped through them. Probably a simple matter of matching velocities with the ship so they were moving slowly enough to bypass the energy barriers. The nanomachines, each smaller than a grain of sand, drew power from warp space. Lisbeth could see billions of tiny lines of energy connecting each microscopic automaton to the Starless Path via equally tiny apertures. Time vamoose.

One more push from her and a much bigger opening swallowed the ship – and burned out every nanomachine in range.

Transition.

“No need to thank me, killer or killers,” Vlad told Lisbeth as she settled down in the comforting chaos of warp space. “I merely gave those cowardly mites more energy than they needed. Drowned them in cream, the way you humans like to kill your pets.”

“That’s just an expression, and you are butchering it,” she said.

“Butchery is my specialty.”

She ignored the Kraxan. The Red Moon had taken damage, but it should make the eleven-hour transit in one piece. She didn’t need to see the future to guess she would not be welcome aboard the ship as soon as they reached a port. More importantly, she had failed. That had been as close as she’d ever gotten to contacting one of the Elder Races, and she’d almost gotten killed.

 That failure might have doomed the human race.

One

Libertas System, USA, 203 AFC

Fleet Admiral Braddock looked over the sensor data, shaking his head in a vain attempt at clearing his mind. The Commander-in-Chief (First Fleet) had been awakened while off-watch and rushed to the Fleet Ops Center, only to be confronted with something as good as a death sentence for his command. Perhaps the entire country.

“Incoming warp emergences. They’ve finally decided to show up,” he finally said.

For three weeks, the warp beacon the lone Nemeses vessel had left behind had remained dormant. First Fleet’s adepts had probed it but been unable to tell much about it. The one sure way to get information, activating it and sending a ship through to the other side, had been considered but dismissed. Instead, First Fleet had waited for reinforcements. Much of Seventh Fleet was on its way to Libertas, but half of its fighter strength had been left behind, part of a blocking force centered around Xanadu System, which was accessible from Kunah, the Nemeses’ original point of contact with the known galaxy.

“We have an estimated time of arrival. Forty-three hours from detection.”

Braddock knew opening warp pathways where none had existed was possible. Everything they had learned from the developers of those techniques, the Marauders of Kraxan, suggested that those artificial warp lines were relatively ‘short,’ if the word had meaning when dealing with interstellar distances. The longest natural known conduits had transit times in the thirty-hour range, and even humans didn’t handle trips of that length very well. Watching the flickering colors a few light seconds away, he realized they didn’t know half as much as they’d thought.

He had spent the time since the lone Nemeses vessel was destroyed preparing for the worst. And there it was.

“Two hundred and forty-two signatures,” he said out loud, just in case someone hadn’t seen the readings. Or perhaps hoping someone would tell him he was mistaken. Nobody did.

“Identical to the ones from Kunah System, and the ship we destroyed here. Mega-dreadnoughts”

“God have mercy on our souls,” someone whispered.

“What’s Third Fleet’s ETA?” Braddock asked.

Advance elements had already arrived, but the main force had needed to effect repairs, and those had taken time. The arrival of the Nemeses could have happened at much worse times, but it was going to be close.

“Thirty-three hours. They’ll get here in time.”

That was technically true, but nine hours wasn’t a long time to get ships ready, not after they had spent several days moving from one transit point to the next without any of the standard resting periods that kept systems and spacers fit to fight. Braddock wasn’t about to complain, though. Nine hours early was much better than late. He only had seven hundred fighters in his force, and a hundred of their pilots were fresh graduates from the abbreviated pilot program that had been set up in the face of the invasion that was about to come crashing down on them. In the middle of American space, in worlds that hadn’t bothered to maintain their system defense forces because they were so deep inside America’s warp lanes that it would be impossible for an enemy to reach them.

And the worst of those is Wolf 1061, Braddock thought.

Three warp jumps away, two billion Americans inhabited the second most heavily industrialized system in the US. Despite the system’s wealth and production capacity, its defenses were in shambles, had been so since the end of the Great Galactic War, when conventional wisdom was that no alien force would ever make it so far into American space. Sol System was three warp transits away from Wolf 1061, and its defenses were only marginally better.

Even worse, the Newtonian distance between the two systems was a mere fourteen light years apart. Such a short distance could be bridged without a warp lane, by ships making fractional jumps. The first human visitors to the system had arrived that way, using a refurbished Puppy frigate. The trip to establish the first American colony in the known galaxy had taken a month. The warp chain linking the two worlds had been discovered later.

Thirty ten-hour warp transits could get a civilian ship from one system to the other. Military drives could get there in fourteen ten-hour hops. The Nemeses were likely to do better than that. They couldn’t be allowed to get to Wolf 1061, which meant they had to be stopped at Libertas.

The allied forces at Kunah took down eighty-nine of them, at the loss of thirty percent of their tonnage, Braddock considered as he went over his fleet’s dispositions including the expected reinforcements.

 First Fleet’s wall of battle consisted of four Founding Father-class dreadnought-carriers, seven dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, three fleet carriers, a hundred battlecruisers, forty slower-than-light monitors from the planetary defense force, and eighty destroyers. The incoming reinforcements included the Doom Star One, one fleet carrier, twenty battlecruisers and fifty light carriers. Included in those forces were thirty-seven hundred fighters, which added to Braddock’s own seven hundred, gave him almost as many fighters as had been present at the Battle of Kunah. If he was facing ninety or even a hundred Nemeses vessels, he would be confident he could prevail, although with heavy losses. Handling two hundred and forty-two bogies was going to be a tall order.

He had one more card in his hand.

“How long until the mines are in place?”

“Sixteen hours, sir.”

Mines were rarely used except as ambush weapons or to interdict civilian traffic. Military ships intending mayhem rarely emerged from the actual gateways linking systems. In this case, the Nemeses had conveniently announced their emergence points with time to spare. The Navy had stolen a page from the Vipers’ playbook. Hundreds of civilian ships were busily placing tens of thousands of reprogrammed anti-shipping missiles around said emergence points. Most of them would be destroyed by the warp apertures, but enough should survive to inflict some damage. Braddock only wished he had more than a hundred or so mines per target, but the US had never gone for missile platforms, since the ordnance was expensive to produce and beam weapons were far more efficient. All in all, he’d rather the shipyards in Sol and Wolf 1061 concentrated in building more fighters, about the only ship class that could be turned out in time to affect the coming conflict.

Not in time to affect the coming battle, of course. Braddock looked at the timer. In less than two days, he’d be fighting the largest invasion force to ever violate American space.

Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 203 AFC

 Lance Corporal Matthew Fromm knew that spending his down time worrying about the news was stupid, but he couldn’t help himself.

After two years in Felix System, helping fortify the place against a new Horde invasion, his unit had been sent back to Malta, to prepare the giant starbase to repel a possible Nemeses attack. The last few months had been insanely busy, mostly spent in training. Word was that if push came to shove, they’d be catapulting Marines into the enemy’s mega-dreadnoughts. Nobody was sure what to expect once they were there, either, so for all they knew all the boarding action simulations they were using would do more harm than good when the real aliens showed up.

Matthew had finally gotten some leave; he’d woken up in a hotel compartment nursing a hangover. A night at Herman’s, a rowdy bar on the tourist levels of Malta had seen to that. Half the clientele and a third of the staff had been aliens he couldn’t recognize, former Horde slaves now figuring out how to make a living. Despite the booze and music, the mood had been tense. There were no fights, but a couple of close calls had been bad enough. Herman’s bouncers were all muscle-enhanced humans who could punch an Oval through a wall, so they’d quelled the trouble before it got out of hand. Matthew didn’t mind. He didn’t like fighting when he didn’t have to, and he had a feeling he was going to get more than his fill soon enough.

The morning news had proven him right. As he pulled a self-serve breakfast from the vending machine in his room and consumed the alleged ‘continental breakfast,’ he treated himself to a steady stream of bad news. QE-telegrams from all over the known galaxy had led to one headline: THE NEMESES ARE COMING. Incoming emergences had been detected in a bunch of places: Kunah System, Libertas in the US, the Crab’s capital, a system in Medusa territory, and one near Puppy space. In a day or two, the fleets would arrive. Starbase Malta was receiving more ship traffic than ever, and most of it was headed the hell away from the Nemeses’ emergence points. Starfarers all over the known galaxy were running scared.

The long-range emergences were all going to happen in the next day or so. Each one involved more ships than had shown up in the last battle. Over six hundred giant ships – thirty kilometers long apiece, five times the size of the largest warships built by any known Starfarer civilization – were coming through. The Crabs didn’t have a prayer of stopping either of the two fleets headed their way: millions of people were boarding anything that could make transit and fleeing, leaving behind billions who couldn’t afford a ticket out or, worse, who couldn’t travel through warp. The Puppies were making their stand further down the warp chain, abandoning six systems and thirty million people because there was no time to either defend or evacuate them. Nobody was sure what the Medusas were doing – the jellyfish-like telepathic aliens didn’t play well with others; one of the Nemeses beacons had been planted in their territory, but the Medusas hadn’t asked for help or told anybody what their plan was. For all anyone knew, the weird aquatic aliens were going to join the Nemeses.

 The hotel room felt alien to him. He’d thought spending his leave time somewhere away from the barracks would help, but it’d only made things worse. Even guard duty would have been better than waking up alone to bad news. Everyone had been expecting the balloon to go up at any time, sure, but why did it have to happen when he still had twenty-four hours of leave left?

He was also worried about his parents. His mother had been working at Malta until a few months ago. Matthew had arrived at the giant starbase just in time to get an email saying that she and his father were both gone on assignment. Peter Fromm was a civilian, but apparently he’d volunteered for something involving mother and the CIA. No details; a mere lance coolie like himself didn’t need to know what they were doing.

A few minutes after he’d finished breakfast, his implant had buzzed with a high-priority message. All leaves had been cancelled. He was to report back to post ASAP. Since getting back to post involved a ten-minute elevator ride, he’d have time to shower and shave. Matthew heard muted curses coming from other compartments. More people with cancelled leaves, or maybe civilians being reactivated into military service. Everyone did four years under military discipline during their teens, and everyone was in the reserves, ready to be put back into uniform if higher decided they needed them. It had been that way since aliens had burned down half of humanity and the survivors had discovered they lived in a brutal galaxy where might made right. Those who’d forgotten that truth were about to get a close and personal reminder of it.

He glanced at one of the screens in the room, one that showed the gigantic space habitat in all its golden glory, and wondered if Malta would survive.

Two

Alternative Space Warfare Program, Redoubt-Five, 203 AFC

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, a wise man had once said.

Rear Admiral (Lower Half) Vincent Kovacs wished he had a choice in the matter. He’d accepted the job as Program Manager (Alternative Space Warfare Program) and risen high in the ranks of the Office of Naval Research while overseeing a project so black that, for most of its history, less than a hundred people knew of its existence and eighty-seven of them were essentially living in exile on a godforsaken planet, doomed to spend decades in the company of dead monsters and restless ghosts while they worked on technologies so dangerous and, in essence, evil, that most of them hoped they would never have to be used.    

Things had changed, however. First, about a year ago, the Project had received a new batch of ‘volunteers’ – although ‘inmates’ was probably a more accurate term for the two hundred sullen telepaths who’d joined forces with Kovac’s people. After some issues had been resolved – in two cases, by the sudden demise of the individuals causing said issues – the new workers and researchers had adapted to life in the bizarre planet that had once housed the last remnant of the Marauders of Kraxan. Along the way, the team had made several breakthroughs; they’d gotten more done than the Program had accomplished in the past fifteen years.

It all started with a follow-up mission to Redoubt-Five, the only surviving planet with Kraxan ruins in existence. The place had been looted by a previous research team after surviving a number of lethal attacks that had resulted in severe casualties, but somebody had decided the potential reward outweighed the risks. The Kraxans’ security systems had been disabled, the local fauna had been exterminated, and, finally, researchers trained in accessing Marauder technology had set up base and began their work.

Blueprints of advanced gravitonic weapons and anti-shield particle beams had been discovered, speeding up the reverse engineering of captured Kraxan weapons. Smaller and more efficient warp generators were now in widespread use, to the point that even some civilian vessels were capable of performances once reserved to high-energy combat platforms. But that was the tip of the iceberg. Amidst the vast records the Marauders had left behind were the aliens’ research and development projects – plans for even more advanced systems the Kraxans had not been able to bring to fruition before their downfall.

Those projects held incredible potential – and risks. The original program managers had hesitated to pursue the most radical developments. Kovacs’ predecessor, on the other hand, had been a risk-taker: he’d accomplished much before his mental breakdown and eventual suicide. Kovacs had kept the research going, and when Operation Kraxan Lore had been activated, the Program had hit the ground running.

Kraxan Lore was ready to deliver, and not a minute too soon. If they had another year, the program would have revolutionized space warfare for the third time since humans had stumbled into assorted alien treasure troves. Unfortunately, they had run out of time. And Kovacs needed to face the chief wizard at her den and tell her it was time to go live.

He walked through the oversized hallway separating his office from the Project Director’s. When Kovacs had first arrived, as the previous Program Manager’s replacement, he’d wondered why the two offices – and their attached quarters – were on opposite sides of the massive black tower that the Navy used as the main facility of the Alternative Space Warfare Program. He’d figured it out in about two hours. You didn’t want to be any closer to the Director than you had to. Being in the same building, even this massive half-buried Kraxan structure, was bad enough.

The architecture alone was enough to damage the mind. The Kraxans built their interior spaces with few sharp edges and corners; their nanotechnology had the sort of aesthetic that only the likes of Durer and Giger would appreciate. The walls and ceiling surrounding Kovacs were black and covered with pseudo-organic striations. Here and there they pulsed in rhythm with the power lines delivering electricity to the building. Only a species that enjoyed grafting the still living limbs and organs from other species into their own bodies would appreciate the ambiance.

The worst part was that Kovacs was beginning to get used to it.

 The PD office’s doors slid open just as Kovacs reached them. The large chamber inside was dimly lit, and something was flashing sporadically off to one side. The desk on one side of the room was empty; the Director was standing by a holo-tank, examining a 3-D schematic of something Kovacs couldn’t identify. That didn’t surprise him; he had three engineering degrees, but very little of what went on in the dark tower had anything to do with any technologies he had studied.

The woman by the holo-tank was unhealthily thin; the shapeless frock she liked to wear hung loosely from her frame. Her gray hair was cut short, revealing six chrome implants that protruded from her head and were arranged a straight line that started at her forehead and ended at the base of her skull. The implants gave her the computing capacity of a mainframe – and that didn’t include the Kraxan modifications she’d added to them. Her features were dry and leathery, a stark display of old age that was downright offensive, given that she could have easily afforded the rejuv treatments that would have kept her looking thirty for the sixty or so years since she’d celebrated that birthday. Her name was Valeria Munson, Ph.D., but Kovacs privately thought of her as The Mummy. Dry, withered, mother of none, crafter of bizarre devices designed to weaponize warp space and the creatures within it. Her grandfather had died on that very planet, after having his mind torn to shreds and the empty shell of his body used by a Warpling as a meat puppet.

Dr. Munson turned towards him. “They have arrived,” she told Kovacs.

The Mummy couldn’t read his mind. He had the best t-wave implants money could buy, as good as what the President and all Fleet Admirals had, designed to protect his private thoughts from intrusion in this brave new world of telepaths and warp witches. But she’d still known the bad news he had come to deliver. Could have been a guess; everybody in the project knew about the Nemeses’ beacons and that it was only a matter of time before they poured through them. Or she could have seen it in the figurative tea leaves or animal entrails; adepts could catch glimpses of the future, or possible futures.

“The Nemeses will emerge from all the gateways they have access to over the next thirty-four hours. In other words, we have run out of time. We need to send what we’ve got as soon as possible.”

“Yes,” she said. “Nothing else we do here will affect the first stages of the conflict, unfortunately.”

She didn’t sound terribly upset at the possibility that millions of humans were likely going to die during those early stages, but Kovacs was used to that. The Mummy had little empathy and fewer scruples.

“Nobody expects us to,” he told her. “But we have seventeen prototypes ready for action, correct?”

She smiled. Or at least bared her teeth at him. “Twenty. The Great Forge is running at one hundred percent and the orbital shipyard is putting the components together at twice the expected rate. We discovered that the pseudo-biological systems can essentially self-assemble with minimal manipulation. The last two should be ready in twelve hours.”

“Jesus.” That hadn’t been in the last progress report, which he’d read before going to bed.

The Mummy was working miracles. Kraxan nanotechnology worked nothing like the standard Starfarer version, but the Alternative Space Warfare Program had learned its secrets. You needed telepaths and they needed entirely new skill sets, but once they figured how to work the bizarre black-alloy vats in the bottom levels of the tower, they could crank things out faster than regular fabbers. Faster and bigger. It hadn’t been easy, taking the newbies, whose telepathic abilities were primarily focused on mind-snooping, and turning them into craftsmen, but when they’d done so, the results were dramatic. Supernatural, even.

There were no windows in the Mummy’s office, or anywhere else in the tower for that matter. The Kraxans had not cared for the idea of poking holes in their massive structures just so the peons could enjoy the sights. Instead, screens provided an artificial equivalent. One of them, right behind Dr. Munson’s desk, showed the inside of the Great Forge, the Kraxan equivalent of a fabricator, except thousand times larger and more elaborate. The original facility was long gone, destroyed in the ancient cataclysm that had turned one of Redoubt’s three inhabited worlds into an asteroid belt and the other into a lifeless hell. But the Kraxans’ blueprints of the structure had been discovered and the telepaths of the Program had rebuilt it, molecule by molecule, adding a few improvements along the way.

The Forge was a place of reds and blacks. The Kraxan nanites did not do well under direct exposure to sunlight or most wavelengths of artificial lighting, a design feature meant to keep the microscopic machines from running loose beyond the confines of the vast chamber. Six round pits were evenly spaced around the circular room, each filled with a bubbling liquid that looked like melting steel but was made of billions of nanites, all working furiously to craft sophisticated components. Every few minutes, robotic arms descended from the ceiling and pulled a finished device out of one of the pits before moving it to a standard factory – or, for ship components, the orbital yard -  where the final products were put together. The whole system was operated by telepaths and drew most of its energy budget directly from warp space.

Kovacs pointedly avoided looking at the screen where the Great Forge’s final products were arranged on a massive landing pad which once had been a mountain until its top was sheared off and flattened to allow large vessels to take off and land. There was something disturbing about those black hulls, something he’d only felt when seeing Death Head gunships, all of which had been thankfully laid to rest. The Death Heads were no more, but he had helped usher in a new breed of nightmares that he prayed would not haunt the galaxy.

“Do we have enough people for all those ships?”

“Barely. Most of our adepts will have to stop working on production and become pilots and system operators. They will suffice to convey the vessels to Groom Base and to serve as cadre. We will need to select and train a minimum of four hundred additional personnel. The good thing is that most systems only need minimum skills to use. With the enhanced teaching systems we’ve discovered, we can complete training in three to five days.”

“For those who don’t die or go insane along the way,” Kovacs said bitterly.

The Kraxans’ ‘teaching’ methods consisted of imprinting skills and knowledge directly into the minds of their trainees. Starfarer implants could do something similar – for data, rather than skills – but rapid data transfers were painful and could lead to adverse side effects. The Kraxan version had a three percent failure rate, and the results of failure were… drastic. Kovacs swore to himself he would make the possible consequences clear to anyone who volunteered. Whoever joined Kraxan Lore would be forever changed by the process.

Kovacs would not be undergoing the process himself. He was an administrator, not a warfighter. And tests had shown he lacked the mental fortitude to survive the process. He was ashamed to admit he’d been glad to learn that. It would be up to others to risk their minds and possibly their immortal souls for the sake of humankind.

And then there was the nonhuman portion of the crew. “How about the Loas?”

The term ‘Loa’ had been coined by the Mummy, who’d borrowed it from Voodoo culture. Spirits that could possess people – and objects – had been part of human folklore for a long time. Dr. Munson had come up with the idea of convincing Warplings to imbue special devices designed to contain them. Kovacs found the idea loathsome, especially since Munson’s grandfather had been on the receiving end of Warpling possession, but Munson had not cared. The Program had been working on that innovation years before the Nemeses had shown their own proof of concept. The Kraxans hadn’t done too much along those lines, mainly because they feared such servants would turn on their masters. That possibility remained.

“Recruiting has been coming along rather well. Using Voudun methodologies appears to provide a sufficient incentive.”

“A lot of people aren’t going to like that,” Kovacs noted.

“We can compartmentalize the information. You have seen all the reports; we do not use archaic, superstitious terms in them. ‘Loa’ is just a code word. We can always appeal to angels, of course, but you know what will happen when we do.”

Kovacs nodded. Null Space Sophonts – the remfies in charge frowned on terms like Warplings, Foos, or spirits – could appear in the guise of angelic figures. Those entities tended to be friendly towards humans and sophonts in general. The only problem was, they also tended to be rather militant. They were angels in the vein of the Books of Exodus and Revelations, always ready to unleash a plague or kill every firstborn among those they found wanting. Kovacs had decided to minimize the Program’s dealings with those entities. The ‘psychovores’ who had dominated warp space until the end of the Great Galactic War were much worse, of course; they fed on the minds – or souls – of dying sophonts and behaved very much like demons and devils. Kovacs wanted to avoid both extremes.

Loas were businesslike: they wanted to experience physical existence, and in return they would run systems, fly ships – and fight. Working with them was better than either selling your soul or agreeing to go on Crusade. Assuming they were on the up and up, of course. That was the problem with working with truly alien entities. Regular E.T.s had the same basic needs as humans – survival, reproduction, comfort – so they could be dealt with on that basis. Warplings were something else. Sometimes they didn’t seem to be sentient, let alone sapient. In many ways their behavior seemed to be determined by whoever was communicating with them at the time, as if their personas were nothing but a funhouse mirror reflection of the sophonts they interacted with.

“They will perform acceptably, I believe,” Dr. Munson said, breaking the awkward silence.

I hope so, Kovacs told himself. Because what those ships can do if they go rogue is unthinkable.

Three

Orbital Station, Ibee-Seven (Botari Rim), 203 AFC

“You don’t look happy to see me,” Lisbeth Zhang told Massatta.

It was hard to read Oval expressions, but the way the former ship captain and current bartender’s nasal ridges had gone yellow-pale when he’d spotted her was hard to misinterpret. So was the way his hands had reached under the bar for whatever weapon he had concealed there Only the presence of three other humans behind her discouraged the Vehelian from producing the weapon. Smart of him; he probably couldn’t tell but the people with her were as tough a crew as any that had ever set foot on the orbital station’s only watering hole. Indie spacers could be rough, but nobody in the system could measure up to Warp Marines, let alone the spec-ops version.

Instead of starting a fight he was sure to lose, Massatta contented himself with leaning forward and whispering: “What do you want, witch?”

 Lisbeth looked around. The nameless cantina only had a handful of patrons, most of them Botari ‘Blue Me,’ along with the usual smattering of Class Two Starfarers. The few people by the bar had looked at the humans and decided to take their drinks to one of the booths spaced along the bulkhead. That gave them all the privacy they needed.

“I need some information. If you play nice and give it to me, I’ll forget that you sold me off to the Chaos Delvers.”

“What? No! I did not…”

“Save your breath, Massatta. A friend of mine hacked into the Delvers’ records. You got a nice credit transfer just before I got nabbed. You used it to pay off your debts and buy this bar.”

“That voyage ruined me. The ship was heavily damaged and we had nothing to show for it. The expedition was financed by several investors, and they all wanted their money back. I was facing a decade of indentured servitude!”

“So you sold me out. Surprised you didn’t go to the US Navy instead.”

The Oval’s head sunk deeper into his body, a sign of guilt and shame. “I did. The Delvers made the better offer.”

“Nice. You got a bit of money, and I was tortured for several years. Normally, I would kill someone who did that to me. I’m willing to forgive and forget, however. As long as you tell me where you got the information about the Doonash Agglomeration.”

“You aren’t going back there, are you?”

“To 4192? I’m hoping I don’t have to. But maybe your source knows of other places where we can try our luck. Or how to disable the security systems that almost got us killed.”

“I wish you the best of luck. I purchased the warp coordinates from one of the Rim’s most infamous brokers. A Kreck by the name of Fair Sextus, who operates from Capitol System. Where he acquired them, I couldn’t begin to guess.”

Lisbeth frowned. “You said you’d gotten them from a renowned galactic historian.”

“That is what Sextus said. I do not know the historian’s name, however.”

“That is disappointing. But I suppose that will have to do.”

“Will you spare me, then?”

The Oval’s mind was full of terrifying possibilities, each more outlandish than the last. The saddest part was that she could probably do most of those things to the miserable alien. He’d given her enough to go on, however.

“We are done, Massatta. I suggest you stick to bartending from now on.”

“That was my intention. After the things we saw, I will only enter Chaos if the alternative is certain death.”

We have trouble, Heather McClintock said in Lisbeth’s mind. Nemeses are scheduled to emerge from all their artificial gateways in less than twelve hours.

On my way, she replied.

Lisbeth and the three Wraiths left the bar without another word.

Capitol was the former administrative center for the Botari Rim. It two transits away from this miserable system. The trip would take nine hours in warp, plus another hour or so dealing with space traffic control and customs – in the Rim, the latter was a matter of bribing the authorities to let ships go through their defenses. Even if they could get all the info they needed from the Scarab criminal right away, nothing she and the rest of the team did would affect the coming battles.

They – the crew of the USS Brunhild, as well as the entire known galaxy – had run out of time.

Aboard the Royal Triumph, Shlorr System, 203 AFC

Fleet King-Admiral Grace-Under-Pressure watched the scout ship’s data with a sense of detachment that bordered on the psychotic.

She should be feeling something. Rage and terror, just to name two likely emotions at the imagery of destruction that was but a preview of worse things to come. Perhaps the enormity of it all was too much to accept. Numbness was better than hysteria, so she took it in stride while she considered what to tell her Fleet Court. The whole truth, she quickly decided. They would all understand what it meant, but deceiving them would only make matters worse.

“A hundred and ninety-eight Nemeses vessels have emerged in the Star Oligarchy,” she announced.

A series of low-voiced growls and whines greeted her words, but the Court stood firm. A few of the younger crewmembers’ hackles rose as they waited for the rest of the news.

“A third of them appeared on Kunah, using the original entry point. They found nothing of value: the Oligarchy has moved all its forces to its capital. That force is moving away from the Kingdom. Another third is at the Oligarchy capital world; battle has been joined there, and we await word of the results.”

The officers took that information in stride, as she expected. The Oligarchy and the Kingdom had never been close friends, and any Nemeses ship rampaging among the crustacean aliens’ worlds were not attacking Hrauwah systems. Which led to the expected bad news.

“The third force, sixty-six vessels, is following the warp chain leading here. They are pausing for a few hours to depopulate every world they encounter. Given that information and warp transit times, they will arrive at Shlorr System in seventy-three hours.”

There were few fools in the Fleet Court. Only idiots would think that sixty-five mega-dreadnoughts represented a smaller threat than the ninety-three that had been destroyed during the first major space engagement with the Nemeses. Grace’s Royal Fleet had been reinforced heavily in the past couple of months, but the three hundred warships under her command – about forty of them capital ships – represented less than a fifth the tonnage that had fought the Nemeses at Kunah.

And an even smaller fraction of its actual striking power, she thought bitterly. For no humans are here.

The Americans were placing all their forces inside their territory. Their battle had already begun, and they faced two hundred and forty-two Nemeses vessels. Even so, the disparity of forces in that ongoing space action was less than her people would face. The Hrauwah had no fighters, no warp shields, no telepaths. Her ships had better weapons and armor thanks to human generosity, but not the special systems that had given the Americans supremacy in battle. A part of her resented that fact, but not very much; if the circumstances had been reversed, the Kingdom would not have done better.

Grace did not expect to survive the approaching battle. She already had survived having her flagship shot off from under her, even though her forces had been victorious. There was little hope she could escape fate twice.

Hrauwah did not hold much stock in prayer. Wishing for the help of most likely imaginary beings was derided as a waste of mental effort at best, and dangerously delusional at worst. But Grace made a wish as her Court began to prepare her forces for a battle that could not be won. She did not pray for her survival, however.

She prayed that the humans prevailed so that they could help save her species. Or, if that proved to be impossible, to avenge it.