A Squelch of Empires (crossover)

[RecklessPrudence]

Damn. ECR, I've got to say that your first part of 721 was what kept me coming back to this forum. You're my favourite pure SW fanauthor (much better than most published SW authors, too), and you're showing that you're damn good at crossovers as well.

I've never responded before, cause I never seem to have anything worthwhile to say except an expression of slack-jawed admiration. But thank-you for the continued awesomeness (yes, I know it's not a word - I'm still going to say it, damnit!), and I appreciate and admire your attention to detail, both personal and technical.

[Raesene]

Even worse, Bellators without shielding against the warp - and a probably very ambitious commander in charge. Tha is going to cause some problems

ECR, please rescue my alter ego from being fleet liaison to the ISB and put him back in charge of a starship - although he could continue being liaison onboard the flag Bellator because he already worked for Lennart.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

First of all, thank you. I'm having a nightmare of a time in the job market at the moment and any lift is welcome.

Raesene, on a more serious note, my own biggest disappointment in this is that, of the three options I originally laid out, the first- carrying straight on, the aftermath, the conspiracy- would involve relatively little to do for the board members who had been inserted.

The second option, this one, would move way the hell out into new ground and, again, leave relatively little to do for the board members with involved characters.

The third option- skipping ahead- would have centred around vineland sector in the aftermath of the Battle of Endor, and would have brought the board members' alter egos back to centre stage. Murphy be praised, that was the one I ended up not doing.

I intend to write that story eventually and give everyone who was involved a share of the spotlight, but there's a lot of continuity that has to happen first. In the meantime, I'll see what I can come up with that makes sense in deployment terms.

[Vehrec]

First of all, thank you. I'm having a nightmare of a time in the job market at the moment and any lift is welcome.

Raesene, on a more serious note, my own biggest disappointment in this is that, of the three options I originally laid out, the first- carrying straight on, the aftermath, the conspiracy- would involve relatively little to do for the board members who had been inserted.

The second option, this one, would move way the hell out into new ground and, again, leave relatively little to do for the board members with involved characters.

The third option- skipping ahead- would have centred around vineland sector in the aftermath of the Battle of Endor, and would have brought the board members' alter egos back to centre stage. Murphy be praised, that was the one I ended up not doing.

I intend to write that story eventually and give everyone who was involved a share of the spotlight, but there's a lot of continuity that has to happen first. In the meantime, I'll see what I can come up with that makes sense in deployment terms.

I for one, am more than willing to wait my turn. I have to go in and get a full-body scan for new cancers every week these days. Docs still don't trust my body without a constant cocktail of drugs being tweaked to fend off some sort of metabolic cascade failures, like one of the old Spaarti clones.

[fractalsponge1]

Partly deployment would depend on how long after Hull 721 this is taking place in, right? Given time and a lot of activity cleaning up Vineland, any of the high-performing officers and ships could have been seconded to region or oversector reserve, and thus available for the Inquisitor hunt in the Maze.

Here's hoping for updates sooner rather than later. I, for one, need my fix.

[Raesene]

Partly deployment would depend on how long after Hull 721 this is taking place in, right? Given time and a lot of activity cleaning up Vineland, any of the high-performing officers and ships could have been seconded to region or oversector reserve, and thus available for the Inquisitor hunt in the Maze.

Here's hoping for updates sooner rather than later. I, for one, need my fix.

Good point - at which point in the SW chronology are your stories taking place (after Ep 4 and before Ep 6 is obvious ) ?

It's good to know you are planning to write option 3 too - stories for the masses !
Keep on writing, we are followowing your words with eager anticipation.

[Enigma]

At first I didn't care about having my character reintroduced into the story since I am liking this fic as it is but I've been thinking. Since Enigma is basically an enigmatic AI, he could hitch a ride on the BP and be let loose into the computer systems of the Imperium. I'd love to read his reactions to the machine spirits.

[Kartr_Kana]

I'm sure my lowly Space Trooper self didn't get transferred off at least I hope since this universe almost demands that the Empire deploy power armored soldiers.

Anyway love both the Squelch and the Plot Arc the Second looking forward to the next installments and I hope you find a good job soon ECR.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Right. I'm not sure about the typesetting, if you think it needs work let me know. That and I really need to go back to shorter chapters.

Dating, Black Prince completes working up in time to have some minor share in the aftermath of Hoth, but would then be sent off to this special project.
There's one aspect of the refit I haven't nailed down yet; I have a pretty good idea how she's going to emerge, mechanically- but what about the paint job?

So many new parts, the old 'mottled' look is probably going to go, anti-flash white is the standard, given the ship's name a black coating might be appropriate- but this is Jorian Lennart here, and even, no, especially if he ends up actively committed to the dark side he is likely to do something perversely offbeat. Tiger-stripe tropical camo?

Kartr, not in this chapter but maybe in the next one. Raesene, maybe if Oversector Outer needs someone who can pass judgement on Lennart's eccentricities. Enigma, do you think you can fit into something this small?


A Squelch of Empires ch 16

The wave of psychic pressure rolled over them, built to an almost unbearable crescendo and finally collapsed as the orks wrenched themselves back into real space, the mechanical nightmares their fleet was composed of shaking themselves out into attack formation.

There were no official datalinks yet set up between the forces of the galactic empire and the imperium of man, so each made their own assessment.


‘Galactic spirit, that was rough. Com-scan, start measuring, and check with the rest of the squadron how well they came through that. Ground forces, internal security- how well did we come through?’ Lennart asked, and ordered.

The bridge liaison from the legion said ‘Reports still coming in, commodore, numerous indvidual incidents- psychotic episodes, isolated and easily dealt with.’

‘Good, the rest of the force?’ The tactical picture showed nothing desperately wrong, but it wouldn’t yet anyway.


‘Most of the squadron reporting in, generally the same- shoal of individual, combative psychotic breaks.’ Rythanor made a quick survey of the data and reported in person. ‘Two problems, Rainberg Meridian is just giving us chaotic, excuse me, incoherent babble, and an individual identifying as Venturer’s exec is reporting mutiny on board.’

‘Good point, when the actual forces of Chaos turn up it’ll probably be worse. First and Third Regiments are on duty at the moment?’ He briefly weighed up how many more opportunities for disorder it would create if he removed one of the active units, against how badly they would need fresh, rested troops when the ground fighting began.

‘Right, activate Second, load them out to put down disorder on Venturer- it doesn’t actually feel that bad ab initio, but if the officers are panicking that could escalate the problem. Advise them to be prepared to under-react, and if necessary arrest whatever panicky fool screamed “mutiny.”

Rainberg, who’s stable, who isn’t panicking? Hm, Pragmatist, signal them to send a detachment to find out what’s happening over there, and have the rest of a regiment standing by to back it up. Keep trying to contact them. Anyone care to comment on exactly what it was they just experienced?’ Lennart asked.


‘Aggression. Self- confidence. Absence of self consciousness. Sort of a Saturday night feeling.’ One of the pit technicians said.

‘That fits.’ Lennart said. ‘Com-scan, engineering; what can you tell me?’

‘They have the advantage of numbers and tonnage.’ Rythanor reported. ‘Two very large, thousand cubic kilometre asteroids with various engines and bits of ship embedded in them.

Four ships in the eight kilometre range, twenty-two mobilised asteroids around a hundred cubic kilometres, twenty-eight ships in the five to six kilometre range, fifty-three ships in the one to two kilometre range.’

‘Right. Gethrim, bright ideas?’


‘They look like proof of two things to me. First, that there can be such a thing as a primitive spaceship, and that from the point of view of interesting things to play with- and notwithstanding their own reluctance- we may be backing the wrong side.

I wish- I’m going to have to get around to inventing- a reliable force detector; how do you go about calibrating what amounts to intuition? Dubious as it may be, I’m getting a lot of static in the Force off those ships.

A kriffload more than I am any of the other four. Their engines are huge, but their emissions are far too low- volume and cold; they’re picking up maybe, factor of twenty, twenty-five more momentum than they ought to be.

Either they have a really exotic reactionless drive with a byproduct or coolant venting system that looks astonishingly like a primitive nuclear rocket, or they’re exploiting the nonlocal so hard, that bow shock was just the universe screaming.

I’m not convinced at this point they’re any less force dependent than the hive mind. The people we’re dealing with seem to make the least, or least adventurous, use of psychodynamics.’ The engineer pointed out.


‘Do you not think that they seem to be the largest, most complexly civilised and integrated and widest spread power we’ve encountered so far is a little bit worrying, from the psychodynamic point of view?’ Lennart asked.

‘Oh, that’s obvious.’ Mirannon fired it back. ‘If you have to be psychic to work with the psychodnamics, deal with the fifth force, then any civilisation that depends on what that force can achieve is ultimately in the hands of batshit crazy people.’

‘And you really think that following them down that path is a good idea, or are you just betting that however far out you have to be to do it, someone a shade saner can still make use of the bag of tricks?’ Lennart said, part of him hoping it was true.


‘I’m not sure whether to admire the elegance of their approach or curse them for morons. If they really are using the force as much as I think they are, and for the purposes I think they are, they’re missing out on so many possibilities- this is the nonlocal-force equivalent of brute strength and ignorance.

If we can catch them doing something elegant enough to be worth calling a trick, I’d need to know more before giving a definitive answer, but I do hope that something that requires genuine barking lunacy to conceive of and initiate can still be followed up on by the merely eccentric.’ Mirannon said, optimistically.

‘Mechu-deru.’ Lennart said. ‘Machines can be affected by the force, obviously, but the other way around, a machine that has a presence in and can use the force- that was very much a Sith trick, as I understand it. I think a warp drive would probably count as a dark side artefact, if we could duplicate it.’


‘All right, the highly eccentric. What’s medical’s opinion of that bow shock?’ Mirannon asked.

Surgeon- Commander Blei- Korberkk was alert, and listening. ‘You mean, apart from ‘ow’?’ she said. ‘Closer to human than the biofreaks, and yet even more unlike for the similarities; and strangely parallel, if that makes any sense at all.

To explain that- when I look at the Imperium task force with my minds’ eye, I see an enormous variety of breadths and depths of mind, and some variety of shape- the same basic selection of features, contorted by the balance of oppression and empowerment, duty and liberty.

The orks are much more alike, they have far more in common with each other; some brighter, sharper beacons than the rest, but only a tiny proportion of minds qualitatively different from their kin. They’re individuals, but they run so parallel, so much alike, it hardly matters.

They are exploiting the force, but I don’t think what they do can be copied. I don’t think they actually “do” it at all, its more ambient than that, a property of what they are rather than an action.’


‘So,’ Mirannon made a leap of logic, with largely vague and coincidental accuracy, ‘you’re saying that their maintenance routine consists of a bunch of them gathering round something and imagining really hard that it works?’

‘I don’t think it’s even that specific; not necessarily harder to grasp than telekinesis, but they project an enormous, what I can only really find words for as a confidence field that seems to stretch the purely material into the shape they imagine it ought to be, making fully functional artifacts out of the half finished and mostly broken.’ Blei- Korberkk said.

‘What that does to their sense of the possible, though…’ she added, ‘I caught a little backlash of it myself, and the things I could have done with a scalpel in my hand right then, I was in the perfect frame of mind for a nervous system transplant.’

‘Not supposed to be possible, is it?’ Lennart said. ‘How would that have worked?’

‘The blade would have gone where and done what I believed it could do, not what it had any business doing. I think I asked for a volunteer- fortunately I did it in Orkish, I think.’


‘Right,’ Mirannon said, obviously a little bit touched by it himself, ‘now I’m imagining a fifth-force generator consisting of a thousand or so ork brains in jars, fed virtual reality to stimulate and control the confidence field to exploit it for our own ends.’

‘Now that is a truly Dark Side thought,’ Lennart pointed out, ‘although from what I can pick up of what the Imperium thinks of them, perhaps no more than the psychotic barbarian bastards deserve- but isn’t one attempt to rewrite the laws of physics enough, or at least only one at a time?’

‘All right, it was a pretty grotesque idea, but I’m professionally offended by that concept that they can get away with just ‘make it so’ rather than resorting to actual brain sweat. They’re cheating to an extent that yes, does remove them from moral consideration.

But I am concerned that, for something that’s essentially activated by imagination, there should be far more variety. Instead their smaller ships- they look about as standardised as anything that obviously kitbashed can reasonably get. Is this an example of them running in parallel?’ Mirannon said.

‘Make that eleven hundred,’ Blei- Korberkk said with a shudder in her voice, ‘I might take a few attempts to get it right- it’s not so much that they are bloodthirsty psychopaths, as that there’s not much else in there. Their depths aren’t any worse than ours, who’s talking about brains in jars, come to think of that?- it’s that they don’t seem to do or care about anything else.

We could manage to be as dirty and as brutal as they are, but we would at least be doing it for a reason, for a cause, to defend or promote something- they hardly seem to. The concept of something worth fighting for doesn’t occur to them, they just fight. No redeeming features.

Yes, this is the poverty of the collective imagination, most of them find it difficult to imagine how things could otherwise be. There are a tiny proportion of sharper minds among them, but not enough to taint the whole.’ She reported.


‘So- what happens when we give them ideas?’ Lennart wondered. ‘Are they devious enough- probably- and sharp enough to run with them? We still have the Astartes on board if we want an expert opinion, if we can trust them that far. Com-Scan, anything more you can tell us?’

‘No unusual densities- they really are as heavy as they look. For that kind of tonnage they’re fast, but not by comparison with the Imperium- with exceptions. Their medium-large ships seem to be based on salvaged or captured Imperium warships, or copies of them, with added spikes.’ Rythanor stated.

‘They must be more inventive than we thought, if they can find somewhere to put more spikes on an Imperium ship.’ Lennart quipped, then added

‘If I read their deployment correctly, their line of advance is toward the bulk of the Imperium fleet, the lights fanning out to a bowl formation, the rocks lumbering along, and the heavier ships up- vector as reaction force. Score one for collective instinct. Can you identify any details about their armament?’


‘The only structural signs we can see on most of them are launch bays.’ Rythanor reported. ‘No spinal weapons, and there’s a general texturedness, a knobbly appearance about them that means either they really are built out of patchwork or they’re virtually carpeted in minor weapon mounts.

Probably both, I reckon. Can’t tell you what they are yet, but I can tell you what they aren’t- heavy energy weapons. With the exception of the two large asteroids and the eight kilometre ships, their power generation is far below even Imperium standard.’


‘Which, if true, makes them a negligible threat to us, for all the trillions of tons they’re about to avalanche down on us with. Their only real advantages are that enormous raw tonnage, aggression, and- if we screw up badly enough, for instance through overconfidence- they might acquire an edge in cunning.’ Lennart acknowledged.

‘On the other hand our more energetic ships can make themselves much harder targets, we have a thrust and manoeuvrability edge that would seem positively unfair if I didn’t think we were going to need every bit of it.

We have a smaller targeting problem than they do, near lightspeed weapon versus ordnance, we should be able to put decisively more fire on them from far beyond their effective range…if the physics still works the way it’s supposed to.

That confidence field could be a real problem if it gives them something like Zen Aim, or allows them to use the old jedi blaster bolt absorption trick. We have two days to conduct probing attacks, find the limits of their capability. Any communication from the Imperium yet?’


From the memoirs of Commissar Cain;

They had dug a two man fighter out of storage for us; they said it was obsolete, and we could keep it if we liked. It was twenty years old, after all.

In the Imperium that wouldn’t even count as being properly broken in; that and the fact that the thing was smaller than a Salamander was frightening enough, even if I couldn’t tell that they were up to something.

A ball with a small cylinder on the back, strut- extended vertical hexagonal wings with the top halves canted outward, and a crown of spikes sticking out from the stern of the ball, the thing looked spindly and ridiculously fragile.

Which was only a minor problem, beside the fact that neither of us had the faintest idea how to fly the thing. It could fall into a reasonable extension of Jurgen’s job as my aide and driver, but considering how much he hated flying and how badly he usually reacted to it, that seemed like a very bad idea.

Even worse, what if it went the other way- what if he actually took to it? The concept of Jurgen in charge of something with the sheer speed and twitchiness of one of their fighters was terrifying. His normal driving style was adventurous enough, without the added problem of him having a nuclear powered vehicle to scare the frak out of me (and everyone else) with.


Then again, the idea of Jurgen as a pilot might make slightly more sense than doing it myself. I did suggest to the Commodore that he have one of their shuttles- they must have some- ferry me over, he declined, saying “I don’t want to put temptation in my ordnance techs’ way; they might not be able to resist a round of pass the parcel.”

I still couldn’t quite grasp where the frak he was coming from with that; he couldn’t be responsible and not care, unless he was completely mad, and he didn’t seem that far gone.

Anyone still capable of joking about their own sanity isn’t round the bend, not yet- either that or they’re one of the tiny minority that are so far gone they’ve circled all the way back to being able to fake it expertly.

I really didn’t understand why he wasn’t more seriously offended. I know I usually am whenever somebody tries to blow me up. Then again, it’s not as if that’s a very pragmatic reaction- by the time things get to the explosive stage it’s pointless to worry about hurt feelings, especially as that time and energy could be better spent in avoiding being blown up.


I did point out that I’d never flown anything other than an escape pod, and he said that was all right, it was almost like that except completely different. (Of course, in actual fact it was the recon version of their standard light fighter, set to record and transmit back to the parent ship on a coded channel. He admitted that later.)

I certainly didn’t trust the flight suits they tried to give us, although, or more reasonably because, they managed to find one to fit Jurgen- the first piece of military equipment I had ever come across that did, and it somehow seemed right and proper that it came from another universe entirely.

The helmets were even worse; as much as I disliked the actual suit, and a much as I would prefer that the commissar’s standard uniform included something rather more likely to keep my skull in one piece than a peaked cap, however stylish looking it may be, that thing just looked deformed. It also felt severely claustrophobic- eye hurtingly, head squeezingly awkward.


‘Fine, another vote against the hamster…plan B.’ the senior flight tech said, and two of his juniors hosed down the inside of the cockpit ball with what looked like some kind of resin. I asked, and he said ‘You want to breathe, don’t you?’

Obviously the answer to that question would be yes. It was a frightening prospect, and it nearly convinced me after all. I noticed one of them giggling in a way that made me think it might be a prank- but would they do that?

They were doing a job that on one of our ships would be done by a gang of low- rate drudges or actual servitors under the direction of a techpriest; what did it say about the way their force structure hung together, about what they were like as a military unit?

Assuming this ship was actually representative, of course, something I was starting to doubt. There were a few different uniforms floating around, but very few of them seemed to be fully clad in any of them, a patchwork of military and civilian. Were they lying, was this ship somehow the equivalent of one of our Rogue Traders?

They were fast enough about it; the rest of the deck crew visible in the maze of gantries moved smoothly around each other with the ease of long practise, keeping up half a dozen different conversations that I could hear- in their own language of course, and I caught repeated participles that I could guess were the equivalents of ‘a’, ‘and,’ ‘the’ and ‘it’.

‘Right, mostly ready.’ The crewman looking after my fighter said, and invited me to look inside; it was astonishingly roomy for something that size, and had two seats back to back, one facing forward towards a faceted window, the other facing facing blank hull. Something definitely seemed to be missing.

I can’t speak for the Imperial Navy’s fighters, but the cockpit of a dropship looks something like a cross between an explosion in a mechanicus missionary station and a piano player’s worst nightmares, toggles and switches and bits of metal everywhere; this was almost featureless. ‘Where’s the flight instrumentation?’

‘Yoke gives you vector, foot pedals give you yaw, grip’s thrust, thumb switch is-‘ he ducked under the belly of the fighter and disconnected something- ‘not the weapons. The interesting bits like the sensors that tell you where you are and the monitors that tell you how well you’re doing display in the flight helmet, which is part of the suit that…you’re not really cut out for this, are you?’


How would I deal with any soldier of the 597th who was this chatty and irreverent, I wondered? Fairly harshly, to tell the truth. Making the troops think you are genuinely interested in their welfare should be part of the stock in trade of any commissar interested in his own, as I keep trying to get into the skills of my students these days.

Although, you do have to at least look as if you’re actually doing the job the Commissariat sent you to do, which is keep order and maintain loyalty. Besides, a painful lesson for indiscipline now might ultimately be to the good of any soldier who ran their mouth off that badly, would be if it stopped them gabbing wildly enough to be burnt at the stake for blasphemy or mutiny later on.

Which, projected onto their behaviour, was an interesting thought. If their ships moved as fast as they claimed they did, they could have sent anybody from anywhere; would they have sent their worst on a stupidly dangerous mission down a hole to another universe, to get rid of them?

Would they have chosen their best- and best in what regime, their most smooth-tongued, their sharpest hunter, their best stand- up brawler, what? One thing was certain, the man they had actually sent had his own ideas about it all. If he wasn’t trying to put one over on his own command structure, then I’m a hormagaunt.


What did that say about the unit he led, and what did that unit say about him? Anarchy in motion by Navy standards, but there was much noise and little heat, mainly joshing, leg- pulling and banter, as far as I could tell. Still, there was a looseness under it all that might stand them in poor stead dealing with Chaos.

That and they were apparently enjoying frakking me about, which never improves my temper. ‘Is this what you call good discipline?’ I demanded- technically they weren’t under my authority, but a good glare can work wonders. This time, it didn’t.

‘I almost forgot you were a political officer.’ The crewman said- well, at least he recognised the concept, and that meant either they had been briefed or rumour travelled very fast around here, possibly both. He also added something to his own people that when I had it translated turned out to be ‘Change of plan, he’s a pol, scrape the resin off.’

‘I am a political officer who has been requested by your own commanding officer to return to the Tantadem as quickly as possible, to discuss his own proposal with my command- and you seem to be doing nothing but perform this farce.’ I said, which would have been prelude to ‘troopers, arrest that man’ if we had been on my side of the line.


‘The TIE/ln’s flight management dynamics are predicated on the concept of the interactive eyeball HUD, so are all the derivatives. It’s an integrated system. You need the suit to fly the fighter.’ The flight tech said, but the last sentence was about all of it I understood.

‘You want me to fly a craft I’ve never seen before, that operates in a manner I don’t understand and that I probably wouldn’t even if I was actually a pilot, with instruments designed for a different type of eye that are marked in a language I don’t read, and that isn’t airtight without special preparation- is this a solution to any conceivable problem whatsoever?’

The tech pretended to think about it, then said deadpan ‘Well, at least it might have comedy value.’ I came close to testing his sense of humour by taking my chainsword to him.

There was movement at the other end of the bay, rounded-edged trapezoid slabs of things that looked much larger than their fighters, probably bombers or dropships at a guess. ‘Hm, space assault, must be a problem somewhere. Right, let’s get you out of here so we can clear this lot to launch.’ The tech confirmed.

‘How, precisely?’ I demanded, realising a fraction of a second too late to tone it down in case I got an answer I didn’t like.

He looked at me, looked at the helmet, looked at the fighter, said ‘We’ll drogue it. Locker nine-four, snap to it.’ Whatever that meant, two of the junior techs jumped to obey, moving with a speed and coherence I really didn’t expect at this point.


Another voice barked out a short, peremptory statement that if it wasn’t a demand to be told what was going on, my ears had stopped working; it came from a short, stocky, dark- haired man in a flight suit.

‘Politics. We have to get hat-man and ragdoll here-‘ the tech said, and I would have had him flogged for that if I had understood at the time- ‘back to their flying bunker.’

‘Are either of them qualified on the TIE fighter, never mind an unstable twitchmobile like an early Vanguard- are they even pilots? What were you planning to do, send two total novices out in a hotrod and then film it and send it to The Empire’s Funniest Home Videos? Did the skipper authorise this?’ The flier challenged him.

‘He just said “get it done”, although I think he’s planning to film it too.’ The tech admitted.

At this point I was split three ways between disbelief, disapproval and genuine curiosity. ‘You did take in the fact that I’m here as a liaison officer? Aren’t you even slightly concerned about the impression you’re giving?’

‘Nah.’ The senior tech said, abominably casually. ‘I figure, if we need to make a point, we just find another flock of those tentacley things and herd them in your direction, see how well you do.’


I already half believed he was some kind of intelligence agent, deliberately out to give a false impression to sow confusion and mystery. He was certainly far too voluble and opinionated for a low ranking squaddie.

‘That’s just it. I cannot reconcile that kind of cold, total lethality with this apparent disrespect for your work. You’re treating it like it was nothing more than rubble, you’ve performed no rites, haven’t appeased a single machine spirit- you’re being unbelievably, almost heretically casual about this, treating it like a day at the pub rather than a sacred duty.’ I told him.

‘New rule, lads; never accept an inter- service transfer.’ He added to his own people, and added to me ‘You know, if you don’t trust our work, you can always try walking. Fifteen minutes to get a wreck like this out of storage, assembled and preflighted- there isn’t better than that.’

I wasn’t exactly happy about his description of the fighter they were about to give me as a wreck, but I thought I saw an opening. ‘If you are proud of your abilities, why don’t you look the part? Where’s the discipline, the organisation, the orderliness?’


The two techs that had been dispatched returned with a cone shaped object about forty centimetres across at the base; they disappeared into the little ball shaped fuselage with it, emerging about thirty seconds later.

‘A hint.’ The flier said. ‘About the third unwritten rule that they don’t tell you at the academy is, Don’t Annoy the Crew Chief. Your life might or might not depend on it, your comfort damn’ sure will.’

‘This is how you run a fighting service? This anarchy in being produces results?’ I questioned.

‘We’re not dog soldiers who have to suppress their personalities to function,’ the senior tech said, looking with apparent contempt at Jurgen and I. ‘We’re craftsmen, we adapt to resource and circumstance.

Too much formal discipline suppresses initiative, too much organisation destroys adaptability, too much orderliness and you can’t put a damned thing down without it getting tidied, you don’t know where anything is any more.’ Part of that was clearly facetious, but he also meant it.


This is the ship they sent to break through into another universe. This was the sharp tip of their spear, the craft that had demolished a ‘nid swarm in a hundred seconds. From the inside, I hardly believed it. ‘Is this normal? Is the rest of your fleet like this?’

‘Nah.’ The chief technician said casually, pulling out a dataslate and making notes on it while he talked. Configuring the remote controls, I presume. ‘Most of them believe in things like stability, conformity and I forget the third one.’

An argument broke out behind him, the tech team trying to remember-or making a joke out of trying to remember- the third core principle of their political creed. Now, I’m certainly not a humourless emperor-botherer like some I could name, and I don’t think I’m much of a dogmatist, but the extent to which they genuinely didn’t care shocked me.

Their standards were just so totally different from ours; they seemed deep dyed in openly acknowledged, existential cynicism that would have got men shot in the Emperor’s service. Might well have got them shot in their own service on any other ship.

Eventually the jokers agreed that it was probably Unity, although two of them chose to lodge dissenting opinions. ‘Well, it sure as shit isn’t Memory.’ The crew chief told them.


The pilot noticed me boggling, and Jurgen’s glare of disapproval. ‘We don’t do pomp and circumstance. We’re regional support, actually I think we might be strategic now, which means we are the people they send in when the pomp and circumstance merchants screw up.

We’ve simply got far too used to hearing politically correct nonsense spouted in self- defence of the indefensible by blundering morons who only know how to parrot the party line, and chiefly use it to cover the sound of backstabbing.

We are deeply suspicious of the political to the point of despising all politicians, and there is not a ship in the fleet with a better combat record. You can figure out the relationship between those facts for yourself.’

I stood there reeling slightly from that, and the thought occurred to me that I didn’t have to waste brainpower working out whether they would send their best or their worst; they had done both. Also that the rank and file weren’t getting or didn’t comprehend the whole story.


There was another brief exchange between the pilot and the tech chief- ‘Did you think of just loading them into an escape pod? Or, I’m sure Commander Mirannon could come up with something grotesquely innovative, possibly involving swapping out a torpedo warhead for a pair of rescue balls.’

‘I’m not convinced he’d strip out the warhead first- and anyway, escape pods and rescue balls don’t have ELINT antennae.’ The tech pointed out, which caused conniptions among the Mechanicus when that little snippet was translated- at least it explained why the xenos engineers had been laughing at them.

‘Right, then. Someone’s going to have to ferry them back, you’ve just remote- rigged it, and there’s a reason why it’s on my squadron racks, isn’t there? Kriff.’

The pilot turned to me, and dropped back into gothic. ‘We’ve not exactly been introduced, I’m Squadron Leader Jandras. The way we’re going to do this, I’ll link your flight controls to mine, remote control you back to- well, towards- that decorated mountain range you call a spaceship. Don’t touch anything until I tell you to, QX?’


‘Pleased to meet you too.’ I said acidly, making it clear that I wasn’t.

‘Did anyone mention the other plan, the one that involved a torpedo tube?’ he said drily. ‘What do you think your alternatives are?’

There were quite a few things I could have said to that, but I really was on my own- with only Jurgen to cover my back- in amongst forty thousand lunatics. It was probably better than staying here, at that.

I climbed into the ball, it was surprisingly roomy; two seats back to back, one facing forward, one- gunner, flight technician, something like that- facing aft, against blank hull. I briefly debated with myself whether the view from the front seat would make Jurgen less likely to be airsick, then decided I needed to see out too.


They closed the hatch, there was a hiss of pressurisation, and then a jolt, and serene nothing as we fell free out of the ship’s launch bay. How the frak did I get myself in this mess? I could feel my survival instinct protesting, but there was no way back now, and this might not be as bad as I thought it was going to be. At least we could breathe.

‘The resin is a standing joke in the fleet.’ Jandras’ voice came over a hidden comm speaker. ‘The point of the gag being that the TIE series is supposed to be so lightly and cheaply built, they’re not actually airtight. It’s nonsense. If you think of the acceleration they have to be built to tolerate, you should realise it couldn’t possibly be true.

What the coating actually does is release oxygen and absorb carbon. You have about an order of magnitude more time than this ought to take. A lot of pilots prefer to depressurise the ball, I do for one, because any fractional compensator lag is going to send masses of air spinning around in there like a potted hurricane, and the engine noise does get to some people.’


As he said those things, the sadistic frakker made them happen. The destroyer’s belly flashed past over our heads in an eyeblink, and the inside of the fighter erupted in pressure and noise. Jurgen and I both hung on to our seats for dear life; it was like being inside the lungs of a banshee.

We were tossed and turned, pushed and shoved and deafened; I found myself thinking I should hand this over to the inquisition as the next thing in torture chambers. After what seemed like an eternity, the typhoon settled down to a blustery breeze, and the noise calmed down to a mere nerve- jangling high pitched moan.

‘For your information, after sixty seconds of full thrust, we are moving at point eight nine of a percent of light speed and should reach your battle group in about a hundred minutes. Pay attention, this is where you get to play with the flightstick.’

‘I’ve changed my mind, you can have it back.’ I said, with what I hoped could pass for aplomb. I might need to have it disinfected; Jurgen was looking as bad as I had ever seen him, holding on to the chair, spasming, and turning interesting shades of white- well, pale grey- and green. Anything that his body had to reject probably counted as a bioweapon.


‘Not an option, I’m not coming with you all the way. Sometime in the next hundred minutes, you’re going to have to learn how to land a TIE fighter. Better start now.’ Aron said, with obscene cheerfulness.

‘What? Did you refuse to send a liaison officer to us, because this sort of torment is normal procedure?’ I said, to buy time and fight back the rising sense of panic as much as anything else.

‘Nah, it was the fact that the request was “Anyone stupid enough to volunteer, one pace forwards.” ’ The squadron leader pointed out. ‘There were a few, but it was only the usual suspects, our normal collection of practical jokers and piss artists.’

‘Charming.’ I said. ‘If you take your jobs this lightly, Chaos is going to flay the hides off you.’ I really still wasn’t entirely certain whether I ought to warn them or not. They were more than half expecting us to try to feed them to the powers of chaos at some point, and I was more than half expecting some of them to be turned.

They had the eldar prisoners to extract information from, but they were probably trying to spin it too. How much did they really know, and what did they expect? Come to think of it, my stomach and inner ear were objecting that they didn’t really deserve to be saved.


‘We’ve been briefed, we know. Mind-bending, soul devouring forces of arcane evil, yes?’ He said casually.

‘Are you trying to court disaster? From what your commander told me of the-‘ I struggled with the unfamiliar word- ‘physics, the warp is far stronger here than anything on your side of the wormhole.’

‘What of it? So are we. Anyway, we’re already spoken for. It was a surprise to me but apparently we are, ah, followers of the Dark Side of the Force. Don’t ask me about the details, I’m supposed to have the kriffing Force and all I can tell you is that it may or may not have something to do with monsters from the id.’

Now that was a poser. It was also definitely not supposed to be the case. They certainly hadn’t mentioned anything like that, anything even remotely like that at all. Foolishly, we had managed not to think too deeply about how a godless society like theirs would get by, instinctively shying away from the idea; apparently, they weren’t quite as godless as we thought.


Hold on. My life was in the hands of a breathtakingly casual, irreverent, untrained pysker? ‘You don’t know how it works?’

‘Every time someone tries to explain it, I end up calling bullshit.’ Aron said. ‘It’s just impossible to take seriously- for those who have it it’s nothing more than an excuse to feel smug, arrogant and superior, for the overwhelming majority who don’t it’s an excuse for failure and a license to whine.’

‘So you’re saying the force has made you feel superior?’ I said carefully, in my calmest humour-the-lunatic tones that I’ve had to use dealing with entirely too many renegades and maniacs over the years, and wondering what I would do if he did start acting like a possessed man.

‘No more than otherwise. I was already superior, I’m a fighter pilot.’ Aron said facetiously. ‘You’re worried that I’m about to flip out up here, have my immortal parts nibbled on by demons or some such dark ages shite, aren’t you?’

‘In the name of the god-Emperor or whatever it is you claim to believe in, take the possibility seriously- it’s a real threat and the greatest threat we face, far greater than you seem prepared to deal with.’ I said, trying not to scream.

‘You’ve really got no sense of humour on the subject at all, do you? Ah well, there goes the plan to start cackling manically and see how badly you took it…right, hold the yoke but don’t apply pressure, switching to instructional mode now.’ They couldn’t possibly be this scatterbrained normally, they had to be hamming it up for my benefit.


He had no reason to be aware of my reputation; well, minimal reason anyway. I think I grasped their plan- which was to fill me full of such ridiculous stories that they seemed on the verge of toppling into the arms of Chaos, and we needed to being them under what protection we could spread now.

Either that, or by ridiculing and mocking a hero (well, officially anyway), they could get me to react against them, which given that I was atypical anyway, would possibly, they hoped, draw my command structure in the other direction…and also possibly cripple the reputation of the only officer of the Imperium quick enough to actively think of feeding them to the powers of darkness.

Perversely, that made me feel better. That sort of applied deviousness was much more like what I was expecting. It also meant that they had a reason to keep me alive, until I got back to the Tantadem anyway.


Not that the next half hour wasn’t a nightmare in it’s own right. He explained what we were supposed to do, then dummied the fighter through it, then left it for me to copy- until I got it right. He kept explaining how it was supposed to work, which really didn’t help- his command of gothic was practical, not technical, and he kept lapsing into his own language for the complex words.

I probably wouldn’t have understood it if it had been in gothic, or that it would actually have helped much. Whatever miracles were going on under the skin, the thing was unbelievably twitchy on the face of it.

The machine spirit was evidently extremely cranky at having been woken up, poked, prodded, yoked and mishandled by a complete amateur. They didn’t believe in machine spirits, or at least professed not to, but it certainly behaved as they were wrong.


That and we really hadn’t worked enough of this out. ‘Right, you can do this one of two ways. Lock on to the destination and instruct your power control system to match velocity, ah.’ He thought about how to do this with no instruments.

‘Well, flying by feel I really can’t recommend. Once you can see detail, it’s too late. Com, what’s your word, vox, them and get them to tell you when you’re eighty-one thousand, now, how does your system of weights and measures work again?’

I said nothing, hoping that it was a wind- up. ‘Right, make it a hundred and five thousand kloms, spin on the etheric rudder- face directly away from the target, and full thrust for fifty seconds, spin to face to check your vector, don’t try and do it in one burn. Don’t turn under thrust, you don’t have the instincts to get it right yet.

Correction burn for vector, and decelerate in slow stages- that means, if you’re drifting to one side, accelerate the other way, and don’t forget you have to spin end for end to cancel each movement. Aim for zero relative at two kloms, call for an escort and let them tow you in. And Watto’s your uncle.’


The fighter flipped end for end and accelerated away, blisteringly quickly- beyond the reach of the naked eye in a fraction of a second.
‘Relax, you’re going to do well. Especially for a crazy person.’ He said, flippantly.

I nearly said “what do you mean?”, but on reflection it was entirely superfluous. ‘There’s some reason you can’t guide me safely in?’

‘A probing attack on those orks of yours, see how ugly they are up close.’ The Imperial pilot stated, receding rapidly.

He admitted much later that he had decided not to mention that the telemetry feed from the Vanguard was good out to half a light year, and the thing could be safely remoted to a landing from the flagship with absolutely no pilot input whatsoever. He thought that it would be more fun this way. I could cheerfully have strangled him, but rather a lot had happened by then.


Looking ahead, I tried to guess which one of the dimensionless points of light was the Tantadem; I hoped it was the one I seemed to be falling directly towards at almost a percent of lightspeed. Then I realised what that would imply, and hoped it wasn’t.

‘One percent’ of anything doesn’t sound that bad; I restated it to myself, as about a thousand times the speed of a hyperpenetrator anti- tank shell, and realised how much trouble I was in, plummeting to potential doom at ridiculous speed in a cockleshell xenos space bike.

Still, whatever they had sprayed on the inside was effective; I could hardly smell Jurgen. I tried voxing the fleet- actually, I tried yelling loudly in the hope that this thing had enough wit to activate whatever it used for vox. ‘Any Imperium ship, this is Commissar Cain approaching in a borrowed xenos fighter, requesting landing escort.’

I just hoped and prayed that someone was receiving this- that the little fighter actually had an effective vox system- and that they were prepared to take it seriously. And that they could talk to me, because otherwise, we would be lucky if there was enough of us left to make a tarot cookie.


I did get a reply; and it asked me for my serial number, my fencing tutor’s name, the colour of my aide’s socks (and this was obviously a trick question as there were some things mortal man really was not meant to know)- they were obviously finding it difficult to believe that I was really alive.

At least that was a situation I was familiar with. They had seen the Astartes shuttle detonate, and believed we were all dead; in fact, Stone had more or less assumed hostilities had begun in earnest, and was in the middle of a council of war intended to decide just how to go about attacking them.

I was welcomed back from the apparently dead (not for the first or last time), and told to get back on board as soon as possible if not sooner, because my knowledge might be invaluable. Things were happening fast now, bewilderingly quickly by the usual pace of naval proceedings.

There had definitely been a battle at the mouth of the wormhole, and we were now in astropathic contact with the survivors who had penetrated into the alien realm. They had apparently been severely mauled for their pains, the details were fragmentary.

I had my own special reason for boggling at that- that the Xenos commodore, after being well aware of this in far greater detail, assumed any kind of peace was possible after delivering that kind of mauling to an Imperium battlefleet. Or perhaps he was simply thinking of the thousands more times something like that would happen if we went to war.

There was another issue to consider, as we waited for the promised flight of Furies to reach us; the approaching chaos battlefleet, previously hidden behind the bow wave of the orks, could be sensed clearly- and it had either diverted entirely or divided, with the larger fraction heading for the mouth of the wormhole.

[Master_Baerne]

Excellent as usual, good my sir.

[Thanas]

So...chaos heads for the wormhole, just as a bellator squadron is about to come through?

Oooooh. *rubs hands gleefullyy*

Excellent work.

[von Neufeld]

Paint-job, well, Lennart might decide to play head-games and go for sith-red.

Otherwise, good chapter.

[fusion]

Ohh... This is going to be fun... There may be some sheets of green in the future...

[LadyTevar]

I read this at work, and once again my only complaint is the lack of quotemarks and odd paragraph spacing which makes it hard for me to follow if someone's thinking or actually speaking aloud. Lennart's part is the worst for that, imho.

[Vehrec]

I read this at work, and once again my only complaint is the lack of quotemarks and odd paragraph spacing which makes it hard for me to follow if someone's thinking or actually speaking aloud. Lennart's part is the worst for that, imho.

Yeah, that bit was a little bit too much multiple lines of thought blending together without enough differentiation. Lennart's got his crew thinking too much like him, and not enough different specialties and personality quirks for character difference alone to carry the day at telling who's who.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Vehrec, yes, it's a problem, and one I was actually hoping to avoid facing head on here, mainly trying to pick up on it on the in- continuity thread where I have more room to lay them all out, where they're not actively and constantly required to perform as key components of the ship responding to the commander's will. The situation here simply doesn't lend itself well to that, it really has been the captain's show so far for force related reasons as much as anything else.

Of the senior personnel, the way I see it is;

Commander Ielamathrum Brenn, the nav, is Lennart's de facto stand-in and is painfully aware of that fact, as is his commanding officer. He's in his late thirties, a keen mathematician, and I think I've just decided that his hobby is going to be building analogue computers. In and of himself he's a perfectionist, but as a matter of practical necessity he's had to unlearn what was probably a streak of control- freakery and instead embrace the chaotic. It doesn't really come naturally, and he doesn't think he's that good at it- although his opinion of himself is less than he deserves.
he's more worried about the social aspects of moving on and up than he is about the professional; I see him as the sort of man who has a very small circle of close friends rather than a broad range of acquaintance. He's an only child, and a divorcee.
part of him does want to move on and up, but it's balanced by that and by the sense that his community needs him- he'd laugh off the notion that he deserves to be considered as the voice of sanity, but it's not that far from the truth.

Mirannon you should know well enough by now, although it's fair to say the Force is getting to him too; he's much more cautious and much more conventional than he looks, although that's because he genuinely enjoys playing the part of a mad scientist. Actually, considering how hard he drives the beings of his department, most of them would have mutinied long ago if he wasn't good at it.

Shandon Rythanor (who really ought to have been bumped up to full Commander by now) is one of the largest problems, as one of the things I was consciously avoiding earlier was any appearance of "wardroom drama"- if you've read Douglas Reeman you know what I mean, the sort of broken backed excuse for a sea story, really more of an english country house drama with a hull, where the focus is entirely on the command crew of whatever ship, the private jealousies between officers, usually romantic, make up eighty percent of the plot, and there's frequently much more fighting within the ship than without.
I deliberately pencilled some of the bridge team in with a relatively light hand to avoid that, and maybe it is time to reverse that decision.

As com-scan chief officer, Rythanor is responsible for making two thousand circus clowns march in step- what sort of man thrives in that position? the Archclown? Maybe- but that's not really how I see him. He's more of a critic than a fellow performer, probably wasn't the best front line sensor technician in his day, but was one of the best at getting good work out of his subordinates.
He keeps in contact rather more adroitly than the rest- I'm assuming the divorce and separation rate for officers and men in a regional force unit is at least as bad as the modern submarine service. I may be overstating the problem, but the five year survival rate for partnerships could be under twenty percent. Very few of them have much home life, he's the exception that proves the rule.

The problem is, how much of this ought to come out under the circumstances? Maybe I could do more about that.

[Kartr_Kana]

Another great chapter ECR, I especially enjoyed the Imperials playing mind games with Cain. Glad to hear that I'm still alive and am coming back some time in the future!

[starfury]

Nice buildup for the coming storm, I was however surprised at how the imperium managed despite it's decentraized nature to outnumber the imperial starfleet thirty to one. I always thought from past discussions that the Galactic empire was always bigger then the Imperium, with a more even distrubation of industry and technology, it as a surpise to see the imperium such large concentration of forces in average as compared to relatively undermoblized galactic empire forces.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

My understanding is that the Imperium devotes far more of its resources to its military than the Empire ever did, and never (or at least very rarely) takes things out of service as long as they still work. Thus the Imperium has a huge fleet built up, but some of their ships are thousands of years old and possibly irreplacable, while the Empire could use its more advanced (or at least quicker) means of production to ramp up production dramaticly, possibly exponentaly.

[Firethorn]

My understanding is that the Imperium devotes far more of its resources to its military than the Empire ever did, and never (or at least very rarely) takes things out of service as long as they still work. Thus the Imperium has a huge fleet built up, but some of their ships are thousands of years old and possibly irreplacable, while the Empire could use its more advanced (or at least quicker) means of production to ramp up production dramaticly, possibly exponentaly.

On the other hand, the IoM is also far more engaged than the Empire is, so those resources are actually getting used. I wouldn't be surprised if the Empire doesn't end pulling pressure off the IoM on other fronts if they attack.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Well, I was actually hedging my bets with the title of this story; it could refer to a damp collision, a non- event- or it could be a reference to British foreign secretary George Curzon's comment on the end of the Great War "a drizzle of empires, falling through the air".


Seriously, this isn't far off the book estimates- Imperium sectors having fifty to seventy-five ship fleets equivalent at least to an Imperial Starfleet frigate covering a hundred to hundred and fifty worlds, on average, Galactic Empire sectors having fifty-one thousand worlds on average covered by twenty-four line, eighty-odd light destroyers and two hundred medium or heavy frigates.

This could be minimalist from a couple of angles, but it is within a justifiable limit and it's also a decent balance, for story purposes, of quality vs. quantity. With the wrinkle that I suspect the Imperium's Navy sees a lot more routine action than the Imperial Starfleet and is likely to be rather more skilled on average, and particularly at flag level.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

A relatively short update this time, a single scene that goes from a fourth wall violation that I'm not overly confident about (and may be excised) to, well, I think I might have channelled Lovecraft. Quite a lot of this is character viewpoint, and not intended as what I consider to be the truth.


A Squelch of Empires ch 17a

The Bellator class were relatively new ships, which meant amongst other things that a lot of the good names were already taken. The problem with naming them after warrior- heroes from Imperial history was that there wasn’t that much of it yet, and heroes of the Republic, well, so many of them were Jedi and clearly unsuitable. The Ultraviolet Catastrophe was going to happen before there was an HIMS Kenobi, for instance.

The naming scheme was not particularly strict; the four ships of the 401st Battlecruiser Squadron had ended up named Bucinator, Barathrum, Blistmok and Benificent, the last the flagship. Alliterative, perhaps, but it had been a distinct improvement on one submitted suggestion made for their sister unit the 323rd, of the Schweik,Klinger, Mandella and Yossarian.

After that suggestion had been library-traced back to the dawn of the Republic and beyond, and had proved to be deeply embarrassing to the tiny handful of people who would get the reference consisting as it did of four notorious fictional cowards, an attempt had been made to hunt down the perpetrator- which had got as far as the public portal of the 851st Fleet Destroyer Squadron before losing the trail.

Which coincidence did not dispose Rear Admiral (Vice Admiral Selectee) Byam Muraiid, commanding officer of four shiny new battlecruisers, to think well of the deep field recon team whose lead ship was temporarily detached from said formation. Although he was in a fairly acidic mood anyway, and most of his staff were steering clear of him.

The mission didn’t really make sense, and from the tasking he had received from the Moff’s flagship he could guess some of what was awry. The situation reports, the starmap, the enemy order of battle- all of them had been crudely and drastically edited, the most elegant job that could be done in a hurry, but they were remarkably uninformative.

Ertalis guessed that they- Admiral Themion, the Grand Moff- wanted him to go in cold, had deliberately left out most of the politics, probably because they did not trust Deep Field Recon’s analysis. Still, they had seen what they had seen; huge, ornamented, square-set behemoths, poorly armed but extremely resilient. They were, presumably, the enemy.

What language they spoke, how many of them there were, what their objectives were- that was and was supposed to be a serene mystery. He was being sent purely and simply as the quadanium fist of the empire, the leading echelon of the conquest force.

Well, the physical ability ought to be there, and clearly they were not intended to be diplomatic and tactful, most communication could be done with the business end of a blaster if need be- but surely exploitation at least demanded some local knowledge? Surely they were supposed to function as more than mere sanctioned pirates?

Officially, apparently not. There were, however, channels. The 401st had an escort group consisting of three Senator class pursuit light cruisers, four Proelium fast destroyers, four Imperator destroyers, all recently attached. The original escort, a composite cruiser and destroyer squadron, had been reassigned while they worked up to efficiency.

Not really surprising, considering the Praetor class were almost seven hundred ‘g’ slower than the Bellators they had received. Entirely apart from the technical side, the new escort had been drawn in from other units, and they should still have connections and contacts… he had circulated the word quietly, and one of them had come up trumps.

Muraiid was definitely not supposed to have the copy- classified Commit Suicide Before Reading in someone’s idea of a joke- of Deep Field Recon’s report that he was currently holding. He was trying to read it as stone- facedly as possible; actually showing the growing bafflement and horror that he felt would only have worried his staff.

Actually, that sort of sick jest seemed entirely appropriate to the contents of the report. There were some positive points; it was clearly going to be a large ship war, which pleased him, being as he was a large ship sailor. He had always felt the fleet destroyers got too much of the limelight.

But… the weirdness, the nature of the universe, the psychic menace of the not- quite- force, what was the truth of that? Had Admiral Themion decided not to pass any of that on because it had already been discounted, as the deranged ramblings of the sort of unstable nutcase who would find themselves being posted to another universe in the first place?

That seemed most likely on the face of it, but it was unlikely that there wasn’t an ulterior motive somewhere, and it would hardly be another universe unless there was something cosmically, definingly strange about it, would it?

The most appealing other option was that whatever psychic threat was there, it was considered to be sublimely irrelevant to the Imperial mission of spreading order and civilisation. If it really was the kind of trivial detail that the existing laws against civil bribery and corruption, against military indiscipline and dereliction of duty, could deal with, well and good.

Muraiid doubted that the old established mechanisms of naval discipline would be able to deal with what was laid out in the report. In an old established unit, maybe, but rather less so in a newly reorganised one. He had confidence in the old crews that had been transferred across, but less in the escort, and even less than that in the new men who had been drafted in.

Bellators were not merely large ships, they were highly energetic ones, which meant a draft of around thirty-five thousand personnel to each ship to deal with the systems the crew of a Praetor couldn’t stretch to manage, and they were still settling in, there were ample opportunities for friction.

The battle of the wormhole had been an excellent opportunity to get them to shake down together, true, but it had been brief, brutal and bewildering for the most part, and their enemies, whoever and whatever they were, had not been what they were expecting.

Muraiid- whose surname translated into basic as ‘he who is like a shellfish’, a name derived from domed cities on the seabed of a long ago colony world- was professionally interested enough to wonder what combat was like between ships which moved so slowly and could take so vastly more punishment than they could give.

Hardly fire and thunder, the flashing lethal passade of Starfleet battlecruisers, more a slow, corrosive mutual siege, fretting away at the nerves, delivering a thousand deaths before the shields failed and the metal started to be torn apart. And yet the patchwork metal sides of the enemy, the mix of radiation blackening, deep carved scars, jumbled waste and too-clean replacement plating, spoke of half- lost battles and pyrrhic victory.

A way of war like that, which turned on strength of will and brute endurance, would not breed men- things?- which gave up easily. The clean up operation hammered that home, too. Strategically, this was going to be a hard grind- even if the report was wrong about the total enemy strength.

The third, ugliest option was that the Grand Moff and the Admiral Commanding had more than half believed the report, and decided to send him in cold as an experiment to see how bad things could really get.

It was almost unbelievable that they would take that kind of a risk with four brand new, top of the line battlecruisers, until he remembered that the Grand Moff really was an ex political officer, and Admiral Themion was basically a uniformed politician, who had been taking a beating until Muraiid’s squadron arrived.

Revenge and getting rid of an awkward subordinate, those were credible motives; if he succeeded in carving a beachhead, so much the better- if not, if he failed, then at least they would be rid of him.

Well, damn that. What was the way out of the trap? There was no authority he could appeal to, going over a Grand Moff’s head was a last resort considering who stood in the way- even if the old man on Coruscant did not know what was being done in his name, there were thick shells of minions and underlings in the way- or rather, because of the underlings he did not know.

Well, no authority except naked force. As the spearhead commander- discounting the little ships of the recon group who couldn’t come even remotely close to matching his throw weight, which he did- he was in a prime position to make his name. Success would be his salvation and his weapon against the command.

He had already almost worked himself up into a state of incipient treachery, which was hardly the best frame of mind to be in when the owner of said mind was about to enter warp- infested space. There were too many things out there which fed on frames like that.

There was the practical thought that they would be best off finding and hitting some kind of industrial world, something with a respectable power grid. Seize it, call in the factory ships and set up hypermatter crackers. His ships burned through their fuel load as fast as the destroyers but carried a hell of a lot more of it, operating with tankers was less economical an option.

That one, fortify and expand from there, stamp the imperial roundel on world after world, leaving garrisons behind to control the locals and educate them in His Imperial Majesty’s name would be the limiting factor…or perhaps, he could carve out an empire of his own? Success could be a road to power in more ways than one.


On the other side of the wormhole, the agents of chaos were waiting. Watching, sensing, for that they felt the shadow of minds approaching. The wormhole was neutral space, a discontinuity that obeyed the laws of neither, whose physics were totally compacted to the point of irrelevance, a two dimensional point.

The powers of chaos understood that idea on a far more intuitive level than the tortured mathematics of its makers could express. As the battlecruiser squadron came through the wormhole, they rejoiced.

The few ships that had come through earlier- such a short and shattering experience in terms of the soul, but that was nothing out of the ordinary for Chaos, which reached its greatest strength in the states of mind expressed by the twinkling of an eye and a thousand years.

The newcomers had been probed, so humanlike yet inhuman, so easy to grasp at twists and habits of mind that were not there, or were beyond their reach. The watchers were not the great whirlpools of soul-stuff that racked the fabric of the universe; two greater daemons, two daemon princes.

They had raked their claws, metaphorically and literally, over them, looking for soft spots, calloused patches, corruptibility. There had been a handful, but the majority of them were simply too…self possessed was the only appropriate term. Alien, yet familiar with and grounded in their own alien-ness.

When they chose, the great powers of the Warp could mass a scale of attack that would sweep any rational mind away as a leaf in the firestorm, ravage hollow all grounding and hammer to fragments every sanity. The Horus Heresy, and the taking and corruption of the Emperor’s own anointed and best beloved, should have been terrible and sufficient proof of that.

Yet the very uniqueness of the incident should have served to advertise that even the Warp did not have infinite strength available to it. The Emperor did protect; a little, a very little, but in some cases just enough. The galaxy was gargantuan, and to grasp a mind and twist it into the proper, worshipping shape took time and focus, which were in shorter supply.

Then, some minds were tougher than the temptations that could be brought to bear on them- which was not always a complement.
There were entire legions of Administratum and Ecclesiarchy drones, for instance, whose souls were so desiccated and dry, so very nearly dead already, that to tempt them and torment them would have been an exercise in futility. They were made safe by their worthlessness, even to the dread gods of Chaos.

Then again, the brute economics of predation applied even here. It was always easier for the haunting devourers of the immaterium to pick off the weak- the floppy minded, the strange, the already half outcast, the dreamers and wanderers. And they were, all, omnivores. Pyskers were far and away the best prey, but any soul would do if it’s damnation would be worth the achieving.

Of course the powers of chaos were perfectly aware of this- insofar as they were perfectly aware of anything, being the whirlpools of emotion that they were- and would betimes aim higher, to disrupt and terrify the rest and in the hope of taking a soul whose fall would shake so many others, whose might would drag the herd in his wake into the arms of chaos.

There was unlikely to be another Horus, whose individual and personal corruption would lead legions astray, but there were still, always, lesser prizes. There was a man in the Imperium task force who represented unfinished business, for instance; a soul who had persistently and obstinately refused to hearken to his true nature, and who commanded the respect and affection of his minions. He would be brought down like the insult to the joyous darkness he was.

The alien incomers had been quirkily obstinate too; dazzling, mathematical little minds, difficult to embrace, cranky and unpredictable to tempt- and menacing when roused. With all that, they could have been destroyed by open mind war- yet there was a certain pride and arrogance among them that Chaos recognised.

They believed themselves to be the best of their breed, heroes, champions and challengers of the unknown; there was entertainment to be had in crushing that- but also, if true, there would be easier and more corruptible prey soon.

Lo and behold, they were right. Fifteen ships, shaking themselves out- such speed they thought with, such speed they moved with, they could be more gloriously entertaining than the dark eldar- and reacting, with varying degrees of bafflement, rage and horror, to the chaotic battle group awaiting them.

It was a considerable force, but they were not there primarily to fight and win- in fact, as they were mostly older ships carrying heavy conventional batteries with few of the genuinely useful weapon types, nova cannon, bombardment cannon, lances, they could hardly expect to.

One limping old battleship with a spinal fusion blaster from Segmentum Solar was their major unit of force, and it had been warped and twisted from rigid, cast-iron shapes to something much less sane, layered and crenellated, molten and flowing- the brutal simplicity of a Dark Age relic made a thing of strange and damning beauty.

Four grand cruisers, five cruisers with the battle fleet and an unpredictable number tagging along behind, assembling to make a formation the strength of the sacred numbers of the gods, each as circumstances warranted it. Today there were three in place, for if anything was the god of war’s business, it was this. A ninth waited, ready to disrupt, pervert and change, if circumstances altered. A shower and shoal of escorts, renegade Cobras, a dark eldar ship, the warped metal of the escorts matching warped mind and soul.

They were there to stalk and intimidate, to place under stress, to ripen and render more vulnerable to the mass psychic attack that was the real threat. The aliens had splendid ships, no doubt, but it was the minds of the men within that were the prime target.

Two greater daemons and two daemon princes, and the trail and sputtering of the sentient curdles in the warp that called themselves their followers, all of them circling inelegantly in this strange punctured place, vultures in the eye of the hurricane.

At least now they had clear sight of their prey. Four powers and four agents of the powers, four great ships. It was far too elegant a coincidence. Invisibly, ethereally- yet, with what hideous might- they swooped to the attack.

[Vehrec]

Oh Shi-[message terminated at source.]

[Raesene]

Four Bellators influenced by Chaos on the loose ? - I think we need Fractalsponge to finish his Star Dreadnought, some heavy firepower will be needed soon...

HIMS Schwejk ?

[darthdavid]

Well this is about to get interesting in the Chinese sense of the word...