A Squelch of Empires (crossover)

[White Haven]

Y'know, if that's how the Imperium measured Necron speeds, it's possible that it's all a huge Necron prank. Take two identical ships. Let the Imperium see one vanish into FTL and then let them see the other ship on the far side of the galaxy seconds later. Do that a few times and hilarity ensues.

[Teebs]

Since Necron activity is so low, you could probably get a clue just from trying to correlate instances where a Necron ship was tracked in one area, vanished, and then a ship of the same class appeared elsewhere shortly thereafter. There would be false positives, but given enough data you could start to piece together an estimate (even if only "helluva fast, can cross the galaxy in a time in less time than it takes our astropaths to synchronize their watches").

I'd be doubtful about the ability of anyone other than the Eldar to actually do that considering the communication and coordination problems in that universe.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The middle segment of chapter 21; there was a line in this that I just couldn't keep to myself and had to post now.


Brenn, Wathavrah and Rythanor between them could handle the fighting part of the business, and it felt more like hanging off the edge of a cliff not being directly involved, but there was command and force stuff that still needed to be done before Jorian Lennart could get back to the good part.

Possession. Anti- possession, repossession. Whatever field imbalances between the two universes that made the incomers so much more sensitive, the locals had vastly more experience of, much more practise in using what talents they had; there was a real but shrinking window of opportunity there, too.

'Can you do the piggyback stunt with a different mind in circuit?' Lennart asked the still- reeling surgeon- commander. 'Map over them, write rather than merely read- contaminate them?'


'I don't know, it depends...whose mind, and, one thing, who are we fighting for?'

'The lesser of an increasingly long list of evils. And when you get right down to it, the ship, the crew and the rest of the squadron. You know, blinded by time they may be, but I envy the men of the Imperium their certainty...Gunner Jurgen, a moment please.'

'Even after passing through your mind you still surprise me. You want me to put them into, the only word is telepathic, telepathic contact with an open circuit? Somebody who isn't there?' Blei- Korberkk said, objectingly.

'I can see the elegance of it, but how am I supposed to use the force on a force cancelling being? It's the equivalent of “here, hold this antimatter”.' she added.

'How close a link does this have to be, can't you just perceive him? Are there not scales, differing depths of-' she was glaring at him, and he took the hint.


'Ah, right. It would have been a good idea if it wasn't impossible. We need someone else, someone who thinks strangely, someone who can strike the discordant note we need to get them thinking about who they are and what they're doing, spring some of them from Chaos' grip...Commissar, a moment.'

'What is it?' The Imperium political officer was busy. He had been in a cone of silence to avoid disrupting the routine of the bridge, as he had been busy yelling abuse and insults at the Khornate- controlled battle cruiser.

He had actually managed to modify their behaviour a little; the stream of mockery coming their way had prevented them doing the sensible thing and killing off the rest of the squadron. They had kept their focus on the hardest target. Cain looked at the fire direction holocubes for the first time and realised the significance of that, and looked distinctly unwell.


The big ship was accelerating towards them, and whoever was programming the gunnery central computers had evidently decided aiming aids were for the weak; the counteraction of their own motion, the essential stability to make a good firing platform, was gone.

Lennart looked across at the prediction tank; Brenn was actively chasing some of the bolts, turning towards them to make sure they near- missed rather than passed completely clear. Most people would have said he was insane.

What he was actually doing was making sure the poisoned- minded loons on Benificent kept trying. Being bloodthirsty idiots as a rule, it didn't take all that much.

Having hit them a few times helped; the big ship was starting to wear a leopard- like aspect, blotches of molten red- orange and cooled black around the bows and forward surfaces where bolt- clusters had landed.


'Commissar, we want to play a little with the concept of possession. Our resident hypersensitive is going to establish a broad telepathic link between the minds of that ship's crew and someone untainted, someone alien to them and sufficiently dissonant to have a chance of jolting them back to their normal selves.' Lennart said.

To give him his due, the commissar was a very good actor, but this was a shade beyond his, or Lennart suspected anyone's, ability to meet with equanimity. He looked stern and noble and heroic, but his face went about fifteen different colours without actually changing expression.

None of which interfered with his containing his shock, guessing what would come next, and putting on a pose of stern determination to hide his frantic attempts to think of a way out of it.

'I can't let you do that, there's too much risk of revealing data classified by the Imperium.' he said, moving from ohthronegetitawyfromme to the professional reason without as much as a pause for breath.

'How much classified data do you think they've already mined from the heads of their converts- what can you tell them that they aren't already going to know?' Lennart counterchallenged.

'Besides, I'm inclined to say the hell with it, it's worth the risk.' he added, and the commissar kept an even temper only with difficulty; then thought losing it might not be such a bad plan after all.

The imperial officer carried on 'Don't you want to beat the chaos powers at their own game? Take back what they've tainted for once, deprive them of the victory they get every time they force you to destroy whatever they've touched? Don't you want to beat them hollow on their own terms?'


The rational, sensible response for someone who would have to live in this universe long after we go home, Lennart thought, would probably be “bollocks to that, they'd be after me from now until doomsday” and it was obvious the commissar was considering it.

On the other hand, that was probably going to happen anyway, so he considered it, before coming down in the negative. 'Personal security. I know too much about current operations, people and personalities- it would be less than responsible to go handing over all of that to the ruinous powers.'

Not so much that they can't afford to let you swan around the front line, Lennart thought; then again, it's not as if most of the Imperium's enemies aren't frothing maniacs and savages who barely even recognise the concept of military intelligence.


Besides, Lennart thought to himself, hadn't I ruled myself out of consideration on essentially the same grounds? 'Point.' he admitted. He turned to ask Blei- Korberkk 'Are you sure this wouldn't work with a non- presence? We're going to need a voulnteer, otherwise.'

'You were planning to use my aide, without my permission?' The commissar said, probably not simulating anger.

'Can you think of anyone who might be more useful?' Lennart said, choosing to ignore the cheeky comment that danced on the tip of his tongue- “I'm sure he knows almost as much as you do.” he added 'It doesn't seem to be possible, though, and the only minds on our side I'd trust in that maelstrom are too badly needed elsewhere.

Just keep up the blather, try to, wait a moment. What really doesn't sit well with the lords of chaos- with that bloodthirsty bastard in particular- and that we, and that ship would have been built to, depend on?' Lennart asked, rhetorically.


An officer of the Starfleet would have come up with the answer at once. The commissar looked distinctly perplexed, having to rack his brains for it- cultural differences, cultural differences.

They weren't quite at the stage yet where each separate second under that monster's fire was an individual miracle of survival, but they were getting close, and there really wasn't time for perplexity of this out-of-context depth.

'Kh- well, the blood god? Thinking, mainly.' The commissar said, trying to see how it led to an answer, then he looked round the bridge module and picked up the point Lennart was trying to make. 'Ah.'

'We've run the bastards ragged for next to no achievement, they must be getting very frustrated, and I don't think they're professional enough to learn from it. If you can get them to turn on each other, better yet their logis engines-'


'Captain, incoming from Dothamian Eimde.' One of the fast pursuit cruisers of the escort, but it was QAG-111 who announced it. Senator class- a fertile source of names, but most of them so utterly obscure that even library search couldn't say who they were, and Lennart suspected fleet command was doing it deliberately.

They were not a popular class, sacrificing too much lateral reinforcement, gaining speed at the price of agility, and carrying their weapons in a compact and arc- limited set of mounts to save even more weight.

Posting to one of those would be a professional downgrade, an insult in fact; hadn't the crew of the Jar-Jar Binks mutinied? Possibly at being forced to serve on a ship of the name.

'On panel eighteen.' Lennart asked for the information to be brought up on an unused holoscreen. An image of the ship appeared next to an image of the legion commander.


There was only one good reason why it could be the stormtrooper high colonel calling, and Lennart cut to the chase. 'So what have Eimde's MARDET done that they need a command call? Siezed the ship from the crew?'

The stormtrooper reacted with the speed of training, and long practise at not being surprised at anything that came out of his commanding officer's mouth. 'That appears to be the situation. It was necessary but they lack skilled naval personnel.'

'What did they have to do, thermal-detonate the bridge?' Lennart asked, and was not at all surprised when the high colonel/acting major general nodded. 'Right- Commissar, carry on while I sort this out, would you?'


From the diaries of Commissar Cain;

If I said that I understood perfectly what was going on at this point, I would be lying. Which I did, of course. I was quite surprised that we were still alive; I caught sight of the holotanks they were using to track the battle, and realised that we really ought not to have been.

The bridge team weren't counting the seconds to their inevitable demise, though; they looked generally confident. Was chaos really making that much of a cock of it, had they thrown away so much of their intelligence?

Our survival was a convincing argument that the blood god's newest minions really had had to turn their back on what they had been to such an extent, the behemoth bearing down on us could probably have been handled more skilfully by a group of trained monkeys.

Then again, you could say that about almost everything orks do and they still manage to be dangerous.


I motioned Jurgen over to stand next to me, because it occurred to me that I might need his abilities if this actually started to work, and tried to think of things to say to the appropriate end.

The Imperium simply doesn't do propaganda, in that sense; it's not as if we're ever likely to be able to convince the orks to lay down there arms and take up crochet, after all. We just don't have the sort of enemies who can be persuaded of anything. Even if we could, they'd probably still find some way to be brutal and barbaric with it.

What I had been doing so far was positive persuasion, commissariat stuff; trying to reinforce the loyalties of the still loyal, if indeed there were any, trying to convince them to rise up. In the name of what, was the problem.

I didn't think that they worshipped their Emperor in the same sense we did, which of course made them terrible heretics but it was a bit too late to object to that now.


This actually made more sense; I knew Khornate nutcases well enough to mock them, at least. There was an entire litany of things they didn't understand, starting with mercy and ending in tactics, passing through loyalty, discipline and personal hygiene on the way.

Something that would work well enough, would throw them into disarray severe enough to exploit, to make them even worse if at all possible, how was I supposed to do that?

It was probably heresy in itself to attempt to talk to the forces of Chaos, or deal with them in any way beyond the simple tactical one of blowing them to bits in the name of the Emperor; and with witnesses, two Astartes yet.


'You, you the possessed, yes you, the one without a brain. Call yourselves warriors, minions of the god of bloodshed? I've seen more blood come out of a bitterroot. I've met more effective resistance from a Munitorum ration bar.

'What are you doing that's warlike, pushing buttons, watching screens? How militant of you- is that piss poor pittance the sort of worship the Big Red Homicidal Idiot in the Sky is accepting these days?

The cack- handed, aimless blundering you're perpetrating wouldn't satisfy a cockroach. You don't have the first throne- damned clue about a the tools of a star warrior's trade any more, do you?' Fergus muttered something and I took him up on it.

'What do you say- those who can remember how to speak? Fudds for the Fudd god, and numskulls for his throne?' I looked up, glanced around the module looking for the holodisplays that might tell me if I was getting anywhere.


Commodore Lennart was grinning. 'It's working. They're getting stupider. They were improving for a while, but they've gone again- what doesn't this fudd god understand? Complexity? You're on the right lines with that.

Convince them if you can that they don't need their computers, that they're insulting themselves and their god by letting the hardware carry them into a battle they don't understand- hit that fault line.'

'This is a genuine change of tactics? Instead of trying to rouse the loyal, you think it would be better to provoke the chaotic- driving a wedge between the two?' I asked, suddenly seeing his game plan.

'That, and getting the chaotics to do something so suicidally dumb that the uncontaminated have no choice but to turn against them if they want to live.' Lennart pointed out.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Right, the final part- grew into more like the last half- of chapter 21.
Incidentally, for those who don't speak Caledonian, 'Fudds for the fudd god' is doubly insulting because not only is there a cultural artifact in there- well, Khorne, Elmer Fudd, it's so easy to confuse the two- but 'Fudd' is glasgow dialect for dick. Although it's actually closer in meaning to dickhead, useless fool. Anyway,



The lords of the Chaotic battle fleet had taken a calculated risk, transferring from their own, well known but also well worn, ships to these shining new examples of power almost without limit.

The main risk had been letting them remain in the possession of the fools who had thought mere materiel would keep them safe from chaos, true; to sieze them before any of their own ambitious underlings could, that seemed more important.

This had not been on the game plan. The appearance of the active, to some degree protected elements of the enemy, the beginning of a battle that it looked as if the gods of chance were turning a blind eye to no matter who was sacrificed to them- not what they had chosen to expect at all.

The flashing into existence of six squadrons of Imperial fighters on an attack vector was just the last straw.


Four flights of Dreadclaw assault boats containing command and staff, eight flights of Swiftdeath fighters escorting them- or more realistically, in a continued state of 'Mechnican standoff with each other.

Forty-eight against seventy-two; bad, but the tonnage odds were about three hundred to one in their favour. And if starfighter combat was about dead weight, that might have mattered.

Even in this space, Brenn's navigation teams could still achieve precision. In fact, they were largely doing it under the control of his deputy, he was busy managing the fighters' parent ship. No matter, he had trained his people well.


Not something that could be said for Chaos. The best they could manage was ruthless natural selection- and considering some of the gifts of the gods of chaos, that involved highly divergent values of natural.

The hunting packs chosen to escort their warlords and overlords were the best there was to be had, but they had learned the art of starfighter combat like carpenters; at best an apprenticeship and a few tricks of the trade, instinct and gut feeling. They had never scientifically and rationally considered their tactics and manoeuvres.

Watching each other's back? Only for an opportunity to apply the knife. Which is what most of them were doing when Alpha through Zeta squadrons descended on them. No collective awareness, no mutual support at all; and they paid for it.


The Dreadclaws called a warning, they had eyes and some, feeble, defences in every direction; anything longer than half a second would have been too late- and for many of the escorts, it was.

The Swiftdeaths accelerated, scattered outwards and tried to reverse course, scissoring round each other, trying to come to face their unknown attackers; two sideswiped each other and burnt, a handful of others tried to shoot rivals out of their way.

No plan. Masses of individual style and healthy hunting instinct, but no plan.


It was the Avengers' and Hunters' jobs to chase down the starbursting fighters. Lennart had used his authority in this space to institute a theoretically highly deviant policy, individually coloured tracer. For kill identification, which was the official excuse.

In practise, because of the difficulty in arming a fighter under scramble conditions, to give everyone their own marker colour meant that fighters had to be more or less permanently assigned to individual pilots.

That made a lot of difference to practical efficiency, even if it was totally out of touch with the conformist principles of the New Order. Actually, that was probably the reason he had decided to do it. Out here, his people needed all the morale and efficiency they could get.

A high proportion had stuck with issue green anyway, some used timed injectors to make their fire cycle through a changing sequence, perhaps one bolt in four or five individual; very few joined Gamma and Epsilon One in going all the way to glaring, practically rebellious crimson.


Gamma had an advantage; they had fought the locals before, not these particular locals admittedly, but they were roughly familiar with the speed and size and shape of what around here passed for a fighter target, they knew what to expect.

Chaos was not so lucky. The Imperials had an advantage they simply couldn't understand; to appear from nowhere, in killing position already, organised and effective- the Swiftdeath fighters scattered trailing multicoloured veils, many caught and put to the fire before they even had a chance to turn.

From their points of view, it looked as if space itself was shooting at them; the Imperial fighters were not cloaked, but they might as well have been, tiny dark shapes sheathed in deceptive jamming, hard to get an eyeball on let alone a gunsight, and fast, terribly fast.

Some of them got a chance to return fire, but they were spraying into the black, by guess and by dark god- it was not effective. There was no good reason for the Imperial fighters to give them anything like a fair chance, so they didn't, shooting at the chaotics all the way through the manoeuvre.


By the time the surviving Swiftdeaths could point on, they had been overrun, the Imperial fighters' vector had carried them past and they were decelerating for another, elliptical strafe.

Many of them had died on the first pass; a Khornate tried to countercharge his tormentors, steered for one of the spitting patches at full burn, Beta squadron got a twelfth of him each.

One Slaaneshi pilot had brought his/her harem with hir; they served a useful purpose for the first time in their existence, as meat shielding. For all of half a millisecond.

They were simply outclassed by the darting, spiralling Imperial fighters, as hard to isolate, as black-on-black as an individual sin on a chaos worshipper's soul. The real contest was the race for kills among the Imperial pilots hunting them.


Aron, lasers spitting flaring crimson, nailed two in the initial starburst but then the wash of mind caught up with him. The bold and virulent heroes of the dark gods, after all, if there was any point of identity to be struck it was with them.

He was aware of the potential problem after nearly being caught surfing on a wave of orkiness, but the ferocity of it took him by surprise. He was a butterfly; no, a wasp and a sting, no a night- black hummingbird, no a winged snake, cobol, keeble, couatl, something like that? Or was he an echidnacean hyperviper, fangs shining in the night?

What he actually was was under psychic attack; the Tzeentchian squadron leader must have realised that the most effective weapon they had was psi power.

He- she, it?- had even chosen the right target in principle, the leader.


In practise, Aron was a harder target than that; entirely apart from his own high seven hundreds midi count, he hated snakes. Resist, he shouted at himself; Refuse to give in, dammit, I know what shape I am, I'm a leader, I have the Egomaniac Side of the Force and I will not sprout feathers on some arse- end- of- reality freak's say so.

Two opposite poles that had to combine, two prongs of success as a pilot; raw aggression, hunter and warrior instincts, simply were not enough. There had to be the cold and calculating side, the icy stability to hold to the job of learning to fly in the first place, to see and judge and weigh the odds- and not least, to hold back the murderer until he was needed.

That, if anything did, saved Aron- although he would have hated the idea, if he had understood it consciously. He was not a beast and a fool in love with death; he was a coldblooded professional in the Imperial Starfleet. Some of the time, anyway. And his eccentricities were his alone, not for this mutant to pass judgement on.


The Tzeentchian met more resistance than he had time to overcome- changed target. Delta One found his cockpit ball full of bizarre and hostile creatures, pleated cone bodies with inverted- cone arms; Horrors.

There was only time to call half a dozen of them into existence before Aron raked the Swiftdeath with laser and ion fire, spearing and detonating the unstable, excess- reactive plasma reactor. Enough, though, as one of the Horrors avenged it's master by putting a gout of demonic flame through Delta One's missile magazines.

It was their only loss, and one the Imperial hunting fighters could easily absorb- Delta Five, the senior flight commander, assumed command of the squadron, and higher control was of course unaffected.


The assault boats, the bulbous Dreadclaws, were under the guns of the pair of Starwing squadrons that had been detached. They were much larger targets, as fast if not in some instances faster than the Swiftdeaths- it was unreasonable to expect every piece of Chaos kit to perform the same way.

These were the personal craft of the leaders and lords, so they were uprated to the limits of their frames to stand; not that that made a huge difference against the massive gulf in inherent capability.

Their defensive turrets did change the game a little, but they could only shoot at what they could see, which was mostly the tracer bolts of Starwings shooting at them.

The contest between ten metre target profiles armed with hundred- kiloton range weapons and hundred metre target profiles armed with ten- kiloton range weapons was not totally preordained, but it certainly tended to end one way.


Just as well, too. If there was any point and circumstance in which the lords of the fleet were weaker and more easily killed, it was hard to conceive of. Chaos champions who would rip someone's face off as soon as breathe- could melt that face off by breathing on them, in fact- could accomplish little from the deck of an assault pod.

Few had gifts that were of any use in starfighter combat. The ability to split a Warlord Titan in half with accursed blades wasn't of any practicality when the enemy didn't need to get within a thousand kilometres.

Fleet management- a rapidly decreasing number of small craft and everything else already either engaged or too far away to do anything remotely useful. Grand- scale, naval scale magic? Dubious.

None of the warped ex-human frames present could contain that much power within themselves, there was no time for ritual or summoning something that could. The confusingly attractive-repulsive sexual, sensual miasma of the Slaaneshi made some difference; the unnatural good fortune of the servants of the Lord of Change in avoiding fire the most of all.


That simply meant they were likely to be the last to die. Epsilon and Zeta had too many kills under their collective (reflective?) belt, too many encounters with people who hated them and wanted them destroyed. The psychic shock mattered a little, but speed was their best defence against that.

The best way to be safe from Chaos sorcery, at least according to their liaison officer with the forces of the Imperium, was to kill the sorcerer before they had a chance to do anything. Good advice.

The Chaos forces returned a little fire, laser and melta all that mattered- nothing else would reach targets before it was already over. Hits were scored; a re-entry like glow around two of Zeta squadron showed them under the spotlight of heavy melta- cannon.

Burnthrough would have taken three seconds or so; the chaos forces didn't have that long. The Imperial heavy fighters pivoted on their thrust deflectors to track the Dreadclaws as they sailed by, jinking on manoeuvre jets to throw the chaos gunners' aim off. No full power evasion moves were necessary.


One of the Chaos boats surrounded itself in warp mucus as a shielding measure; almost certainly Nurglite, it bought the rest of the group a small measure of time as everyone shot at it to make the disgusting thing go away.

A Tzeentchian boat dissolved in a rainbow of colours, baffling to the eye; Imperial targeting and autotracking systems were better than that, and that boat too found itself the centre of attention as twenty-four heavy fighters laid into it. Most of the bolts pierced nothing more than the veil of illusion, but enough still hit.

It was hardly an exchange of fire. More of an execution, which was exactly as it was supposed to be, as the forces of Empire and Imperium needed it to be. The Chaos fleet, and their recent additions, were leaderless now, the lords of the fleet vapour.

Their deliberately and purposely immaterial masters, if the prize was not to slip from their grasp entirely or be seized back by it's rightful owners, had much to do.



On board the former Imperial flagship Benificent, the tide of transformation and madness that had swept over them had left some strange human wreckage behind. The metal itself had not started to mutate- yet.

That would come, if they could only win, and therefore live. At the moment it wasn't looking good. Almost all the ships of the escort group were shooting at them, they were being hit- and in return?

The ship that had caught their attention, only a destroyer, they had landed a couple of shots, but it had an almost unnatural ability to evade and avoid fire. Literally unnatural, some rival Power? A darkness they had brought with them- that made sense.

Was that what was happening on the level of the Warp, Chaos Divided- in this case, disastrously divided- being faced and faced down by Darkness Undivided?


It made more sense; it was a believable explanation for their inability to do the work of a warrior and kill, spill blood in the name of their god. There was no such thing as an acceptable explanation. No failure was or could be; blood must flow.

The actual explanation, that a large proportion of the operations officers were dead by their own or each other's hand and the survivors were either driven out of their wits or thoroughly possessed by the horror, and a large part of the lower deck was in rightful mutiny against their corrupted command, was literally unthinkable.

For one thing, there were too few clear brains left to think it. The officer corps was mostly mad or blood-mad, the droids, some had indeed been corrupted, and terrible they were; the stormtrooper contingent had split massively in favour of the blood god, warrior frenzy releasing them from their mental straitjackets of absolute order and duty.

The lower deck, the many that had been lightly washed with corruption at best, were the loyalists if anybody was- although being roused by an Imperium Commissar had resulted in half a dozen strange heresies coalescing out of the addled confusion of emperors.


That, in itself, was possibly the single most fatal factor. There was blood to be spilled and loyalists to butcher; faced with the cognitive dissonance of being a professional military technician in a more or less professional (if overly straitlaced and politically correct) service or a frenzied barbarian, it was too much to straddle.

Conversion destroyed too much of the officers of the Benificent's real talent; trained monkeys would actually have been more effective. After all, they had piloted spaceships before. Under the mental force pounding on them, the men of the fleet had to break one way or the other, and those that broke towards chaos broke with their past- and their learning.

The Pit was living up to it's name, now; a charnel house, a mound of shredded flesh and splintered bone in crude imitation of Khorne's own, and on top a crudely fused, glued and wired throne- mimicking assemblage of rib- cages and long bones, topped with a pair of wire bound femurs supporting a skull with an Admiral's hat on top.

The fact that that left most of the operating boards of the combat information centre buried under a pile of blood and entrails escaped their attention. Local control? In whose name?


The strongest personalities, the most malevolent, had taken in the greatest share of the daemonic, warping power. Survival, what did the blood god care about survival? Blast this flea out of the way, and then on to the great work, to soon-to-be-unholy Terra. Vengeance and transformation; what else was worth the effort?

Instead there was this- this abominably difficult little flea of a ship, dancing and weaving, and at times seeming to multiply; were there thousands of it, was there some peculiar time compression trick these ships were capable of? It was an incoherent blur, only the fire it was pouring in their direction distinct.

A flea armed with a rapier. They had hit it four, five times? More than that actually, but the lighter guns against the shielding- only the individual heavy bolts scored, and there was a crater in the fleet destroyer's superstructure, another in the belly just aft of the bulge where the secondary landing bay used to be, one on the hardened slope of the forward hull.


Damage, but by comparison- if Black Prince was a flea with a rapier, and deep field and the loyal elements of the escort group were mayflies with daggers, the Benificent was an armoured knight trying to swat them with a greatsword.

Those rapiers and daggers found the gaps in the big ship's armour, scored local overloads and did real damage, far too often for comfort. The deceptive and barrage jamming that would have made it impossible for them to concentrate fire, the active defences of the ship, were far below par. It was a spread of subtleties the Blood God simply did not grasp.

They were also losing the ability to grasp it, considering what the primary targets were; sensor domes, weapon directors, manoeuvre jets, electronic warfare systems.

They were being nibbled to death, and the regulatory branch officer- the bloody sadist whose head had been a most precise fit for the teachings of the blood god- who had battered the rest of the top command to death with a femur and sat on the throne resented that furiously.

The never to be sufficiently damned moderates who were slowly peeling the ship to the death of a thousand cuts, these straitjacketed, straitlaced civilised scum that stood in their way- no torture would have been too good for them in principle, but that was the despicable Slaanesh's way; smash them aside in red mist, that was Khorne's solution.


It was proving far more difficult than expected. They danced through all the fire that could be sent against them, each separate moment a repeatable miracle of intelligent sensing and prediction and evasion, and now they were actively mocking the blood god- as well as passively by continuing to exist when they had been told not to.

That voice, that hated enemy voice, probing, insulting, rousing the loyalists to oppose them- there was a fireball from the port side of the ship; the most serious hit they had taken yet, one turret had fired directly into the back of another.

It was the spilling of blood, but it was also suicidal stupidity; and the voice picked up on it, reminding them how machine bound they were, and how machine illiterate they had become.

That alone would have earned him the undying enmity of chaos, and a thousand lifetimes of endlessly death by torment and resurrection to die again; if he had not already been condemned to it if the dark powers ever got their hands on him.


Somehow the enemy had got inside their communication systems; so rage against them and smash them down. There were obvious drawbacks to this, not that they had sunk in in time, and it would have been necessary to shout down the corridors- if they were not already filled with moans and screams.

Only Chaos was holding the ship together, only the animating and directing will of the dark powers was enabling one part of the ship to know what the other did, and the more tightly it held, the more what used to be came apart.

There was a Chaos Spawn formed out of the main computer bank; liberated from all controls and empowered, the computer had achieved full sentience, promptly lost the plot completely and mutated to clawed and horned goo. Local control was disintegrating under electronic intrusions more subtle than the mocking, probing Imperium voice. Not more provoking, though.


Reminding them that they were not serving the Blood God well at all; that they had broken with everything that had nurtured and made them, with the Galactic Order, New and Old, for in order to be monsters- and hopelessly, pitiably ineffectual ones at that;

they were terrorists who couldn't terrorise a mouse, warriors who had no idea how to make war, murderers who couldn't kill a wet afternoon; brothers in arms, for that too was part of Khorne's creed and the part that more than any other had made the Heresy possible, who had turned their arms overwhelmingly on each other.

All these things were true, and although the dark powers only cared about truth insofar as dealing with what was true helped them to succeed, they were increasingly painfully aware that they were not succeeding, and to be so continually reminded of it was literally maddening.


Chaos warships disappeared for centuries at a time; that may have been too much, but the Benificent's crew needed at least months, possibly years to marinate in and integrate chaos into their psyches, to fight effectively under the banner of the bloody god. They were still in transition, and the dark powers had been forced to take too much of them, too soon.

They could not mould the snarling mask to their own features, so the features had been ripped away; if any of them were aware that they were being goaded, they were afraid to say so in the toxic psychic atmosphere, macho raised to the n'th degree, that permeated and paralysed the ship.

Admiral Muraiid was dead; he had literally tried to retreat into his shell- thanks to the mutating influence he had had one, briefly- and they had prised him open. It was his skull under his hat. He was too political, too thinky for Khorne's taste. He would have recognised that they were being goaded into behaving with suicidal aggression.


The maleficent moron in charge now did not. There was one critical, terminal mistake they could make, and between them the psychological provocation of the Commissar and the physical provocation of the Commodore had goaded them into it.

Kill! Skulls! Berserk! Not working? Berserk harder! Sanity is for the weak, Blood for the Blood God!

Using a dead sensor control officer's spine as a whip, the would- be champion of chaos rounded up the survivors of the bridge team to use as runners; go, carry the message, put your treacherous computers to death.

And none of this mincy, nancy, Slaaneshi dancing around nonsense. Full ahead- no, flank. No deviations. Charge the little bastard down, get close enough that we can see him.


Under some circumstances and some rules of engagement, that was equivalent to surrender. No evasion, no jamming, no return fire, dead straight course, a near perfect target. It was time.

'They've passed the psychological point of no return- Right, Ob, get the basket moving. W7, rotate your charge to position two- Custos Sempiternus, do you see the target?' Lennart ordered, on the bridge of Black Prince.

The imperial tanker whose alphanumeric identifier ended in W7 had been carrying the Mechanicus cruiser; although nominally a support ship, it manoeuvred so much faster and with greater precision than the purposed warship that the Dominator had simply had to play piggyback and sit quiet- until her heavy main gun was needed.

Rotate to position two meant move it out and away from the hull, slacken the forcefield clamps. Although still loosely gripped by, and benefiting from the main propulsion of the Imperial tanker, the Mechanicus cruiser had fine thruster control restored, to bring her man weapon to bear.


This was not simply politics, letting them have a share of the kill; they genuinely possessed the best tool for the job. They had hoped they would be called on to use it, and they were already at full alert. They saw.

'Your aimpoint is the after end of the upper superstructure, track the target, fusing delay factor yellow three...' To the commissar he said 'Just like rancor hunting. They're huge apelike things, bit like an overgrown ork now you tell me about them.

They're lazy, so you sneak around until you find one asleep, then prod it with a sharp stick. It'll leap up and try to kill you; duck inside it's guard, and whack it on the balls with the stick. Then roll out of the way. It'll double up in agony and bring it's head down to your level.

Find the piggy little eye, shove the stick in until it gets to the brain and there you are.'


'Exploiting one vulnerability after another, one to open up another...' the commissar grasped the meaning of the tale. 'Is this a common sport among your people?'

'Galactic Spirit, no, how crazy do you think I am? That's a pastime for a complete nutball. Baiting battlecruisers is much more fun...' Lennart said, grinning, before turning back to his own people. 'Ob, I think we might be able to get away with maiming this one. Hit MCR, central gunnery. Custos Sempiternus, you may fire when ready.'

The first of the last, the opening move of the end game, was a single nova cannon shot. Superaccelerated to the edge of lightspeed, detonation precisely timed. A functioning Imperial warship would have seen it coming and twisted out of the way, jammed and detonated it prematurely, or just plain shot it out of the sky.

Benificent was not a functioning Imperial warship, and could do none of those things. All the electronic advantage was on the loyalist side; for once, precision was possible.

The heavy round tore through Benificent's shields, structure of the hull bucking and twisting under the referred momentum even before the thing detonated.


Of the four immaterial lords of Chaos who had masterminded the siezure of the four hundred and first battlecruiser squadron, the Khornate was a veteran of the Heresy, a leader of a great company of twisted World Eater Marines until he had lived up to the chapter's name, and gained ascension thereby.

He suffered from the same flaw as they all had- a tendency to overlook the limits of the merely human, common to all the Astartes of the day loyalist and traitor aside, and now that he had completely transcended them he was even less interested. He did know warships and space war, though.

Evidently it was going to be necessary to do this in person. He/it materialised on the bridge deck of the battlecruiser, and the smell of blood was pleasing- but this was the wrong place for it. There were working spaces and there were ritual spaces.

He lashed out, catching the pro tem commander with a backhand swipe of accursed greataxe. 'You fool, how much have you wasted? Get that-' the bone pile in the Pit- 'up here, work those, I am in charge and we-'

Which was as far as even a daemon lord could get, before the plasma-to-exotic fireball boiled up through the deck under his feet. Nova cannon may actually have been slightly more common than psycannon, but they did work as a means of making a daemon go away.



'The basket' was the combined torpedo volleys of the squadron and escort group. Counting second and third launches it amounted to a hundred and sixty rounds. With the bridge module gone, the main computers and sensors gone, the crew mostly insane, the hit rate would be far higher than normal.

It was more than enough to shear through the big ship's tough outer skin and shatter central gunnery control, central flight control, the machinery control room- the main alternative command centres of the battlecruiser. The ship began to tumble and cease fire as the out- of-command main reactor shut itself down.


'Mission kill.' Lennart announced, trying not to allow either the immense relief that he felt or the sudden urge to gloat to show. 'External, Nightblade- ah, good, Commander Thanas.' he said to the legal-officer-acting-commander as they were connected, 'Your division, finish the job, pick off local control centres and power generation, ionise, you know the drill.

Disable Benificent as completely as possible; if that's not possible, finish her with torpedoes, then microjump to join us attacking Bucinator. What do you think I want you to do about the crew?' he said, and it was partly a trick question.

What he was really asking was 'Show me how good your judgement is.'

'Read the balance of forces, as according to your own com- scan teams- if the loyalists can be effectively supported do so, if not evacuate them, and vet every man before allowing them on board.' The ex legal officer responded.

'Good. Carry on.' Lennart had been hoping he would notice that; should have known that he would.


'You cannot concievably- this is insane. How can you do that, see your own forces brought to ruin by such, and seriously contemplate the prospect of allowing any of those men back into your space without proper purging?' the Deathwatch Marine, who had been watching from the back of the bridge module, came forward and declaimed.

'The warp, force, call it what you like- I think I might start calling it the Para-Elemental Plane of Brainfuzz just to annoy it- is weaker on our side, remember? It should make it drastically easier to cleanse them, possibly within the limits of normal psychiatric care.' Lennart said, optimistically.

'Ah widnae' count on it, if ah were you.' Brother- Sargeant Fergus pointed out.

'The alternative hypothesis, of course, being that I just hate psychiatrists.' Lennart pointed out. Which didn't satisfy them, but they were on his ship and the Caledonian at least knew not to interfere.


'That was probably the easy one, it's going to be a long day. Psyops against the Tzeentchian, ex-HIMS Blistmok, long range fire ultimately spiralling in for a boarding action against ex-HIMS Bucinator. The gooey one we can sort out later. And damned well done. Everybody. We're in the record books now.'

'Ay, and for mair reasons than one. You do realise, do ye no', that ye literally phoned that one in?' The Caledonian sargeant said to the Commissar, who looked retroactively surprised when he thought about it.

Lennart snorted with laughter. 'He's right, Ciaphas. I may pretend otherwise in the AAR,' said with a sly grin and a chuckle from the rest of the bridge team, 'but there really was no way we could have pulled that off against a crew that hadn't comprehensively lost the plot- you actually did convince the servants of Chaos to destroy themselves over the comlink.'

[Thanas]

Great work. The formatting on this one is also much improved - and as usual, I just love reading your spacebattles.

[Simon_Jester]

What Thanas said. Also, some minor notes:

The lower deck, the many that had been lightly washed with corruption at best, were the loyalists if anybody was- although being roused by an Imperium Commissar had resulted in half a dozen strange heresies coalescing out of the addled confusion of emperors.

Those would be a real laugh to listen to...

There was a Chaos Spawn formed out of the main computer bank; liberated from all controls and empowered, the computer had achieved full sentience, promptly lost the plot completely and mutated to clawed and horned goo. Local control was disintegrating under electronic intrusions more subtle than the mocking, probing Imperium voice.

From inside, from outside? I wonder if there's a copy of Doctor Nygma still hiding on Black Prince... I hope not; in an argument between him and a Lord of Change, it's not clear who would win but I suspect the bystanders would lose.

'Galactic Spirit, no, how crazy do you think I am? That's a pastime for a complete nutball. Baiting battlecruisers is much more fun...' Lennart said, grinning, before turning back to his own people.

Emphasis on "nutball," or emphasis on "complete?"

Which was as far as even a daemon lord could get, before the plasma-to-exotic fireball boiled up through the deck under his feet. Nova cannon may actually have been slightly more common than psycannon, but they did work as a means of making a daemon go away.

Ah, yes, the exorcism ritual according to the Church of Our Blessed Lady Of Superior Firepower:

"In the beginning, there was... there was... well, there was a lot of quark-gluon plasma, the odd photon, a truly unreasonable number of neutrinos. But there certainly wasn't you. Yuck. Ah, well, the first microsecond after the Big Bang was so clean. Let's try for a touch of that old-time religion, shall we?"

And yes, I may be overestimating just what a nova cannon is capable of... but I suspect not by much, not at close range. Someone throw me an expression for the explosive yield and I'll do a guesstimate.

[Alan Bolte]

An awesome battle - much more fun than the coldly clinical fights against more typical targets.

[drakensis]

Another tale for the legend of Ciaphas Cain: talking a Chaos infested warship into sitting still so it could be crippled.

[Singular Quartet]

Church of Our Blessed Lady Of Superior Firepower

You know... this needs to be the name of a Chapter/Convent of the Adeptus Soroitas.

[Simon_Jester]

Hmm. Do they have a naval detachment?

For that, I might almost consider having my first 40k army be Sisters of Battle, just for the name... Nah. Not even for that do I want to delve into that kind of crazy. It's going to be Guard if it's anything at all.

[LadyTevar]

Another tale for the legend of Ciaphas Cain: talking a Chaos infested warship into sitting still so it could be crippled.

No no nno...

It's Ciaphas Cain goading a Khornite Ship into a suicide charge that gets them blown to bits.

[RecklessPrudence]

It's Ciaphas Cain goading a Khornite Ship into a suicide charge that gets them blown to bits.

Isn't that pretty much a Khorne cultists entire battle plan? It's like the old Black Templar rules; 'CHARGE!' *boom* 'They killed brother Bob, CHARGE!' *boom* 'They killed brother Ted, CHARGE!' - repeat until you get in melee or run out of elite tactical geniuses.

I'd like to see what'd happen if a fleet tug got into some of more more loony followers of Khorne's hands; it'd be like a cross between an Ork Brute Ramship and a Tyranid ship equipped with Massive Claws. 'All Ahead Flank! Get us into melee with that battlecruiser! Blood for the Blood God!'

[Simon_Jester]

Another tale for the legend of Ciaphas Cain: talking a Chaos infested warship into sitting still so it could be crippled.

No no nno...
It's Ciaphas Cain goading a Khornite Ship into a suicide charge that gets them blown to bits.

Eh, works either way for me. After all, the legend of Ciaphas Cain is always exaggerated compared to what he actually accomplishes... Plus, if you have decent fire prediction, an enemy making a straight line charge might as well be standing still.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

(Suppresses unwise rant about typesetting and formatting and how it's about the bloody words...no, suppress, suppress.)

Sci fi makes it look easy. Crewing a ship is a frighteningly thinky business; order, discipline, dedication- it's surprising that Chaos can do it at all, but they evidently can.

Not, however, at once; they need mental time, get over the shock, reintegrate their psyches, adjust to the new order. What Ciaphas did was lean on them, push them, force them to split between the old and the new loyalties, and those that threw away their past threw away their ability to manage the ship. Oops.

There was- anyone remember the old square-box Space Fleet game, the long-gone precursor to Battlefleet Gothic? I had an absurd amount of minis for it, back in the day, and there was an Imperial battleship- Dictator class- the main armament of it was two bloody great claws and a drill. There were no Chaos designs, you were supposed to just use Imperial ships with a different paint job, but...

Some of the names remained the same, and the old Dominator- class nova cannon carrier had an effect that was, well, closest thing in Gothic is the warp core implosion crit result. Spectacularly, grotesquely powerful. Modern day nova cannon, outside Battlefleet Solar, aren't that bad.

Even so, they're about the most effective thing the Imperium Navy has to offer. The way I'm mentally modelling this, standard batteries are designed to fill an area with firepower to catch a distant, manoeuvring target, a shotgun blast where each 'pellet' might be a multi-ton nuclear shell, or it's energy equivalent in plasma, laser, melta fire. Fine, but the amount of empty space that gets strafed on the off chance, energy density over area- it's not really good enough to do much to the Imperial Starfleet, or any serious warship thereof. Not useless, but an uphill struggle to make it useful.

Missiles and fighters are so big and slow by comparison, they are genuinely useless. Lances, on the other hand, are comparable to medium- high end HTL, roughly achieving parity as an effective weapon, Astartes bombardment cannon are slightly over parity with most of the Imperial Starfleet's armament- they're heavy demolition mass drivers that can also be used ship to ship, and they're vicious. (Gothic rules reference; use firepower table, ignore armour, hit on 4+always, crit on 4+)

Nova cannon fire a single very large projectile whose detonation imitates a small sun or a very, very large nuclear fireball, briefly. The most lethal thing about it is actualy the kinetics- one shot more or less wrote off the Imperial battlecuiser Irreversible in the Battle of the Rishi Mouth, ripping and severely shocking the structure and scattering fragments of unexploded warhead throughout the ship. You can bet that incident got closely studied.

Irreversible, incidentally, is the ship that 'overran' Amberley's yacht, on her way back to a main dockyard for repair if possible or scrappage if not.

[Thanas]

^A well chosen name then.

[Simon_Jester]

Even so, they're about the most effective thing the Imperium Navy has to offer. The way I'm mentally modelling this, standard batteries are designed to fill an area with firepower to catch a distant, manoeuvring target, a shotgun blast where each 'pellet' might be a multi-ton nuclear shell, or it's energy equivalent in plasma, laser, melta fire. Fine, but the amount of empty space that gets strafed on the off chance, energy density over area- it's not really good enough to do much to the Imperial Starfleet, or any serious warship thereof. Not useless, but an uphill struggle to make it useful.

Yeah, it would be like hunting tanks with standard artillery shells. They're designed to have a huge lethal footprint, but against Star Wars ships they're going to need direct hits... in which case the energy that was supposed to go into creating a hundred-kilometer fireball energetic enough to fry battleships is all going off on the inside of your ship. Ouch.

Got a rough estimate in joules? Heavy enough to one-shot the shields on a Star Wars supercapital is... again, ouch. I'm not even sure what that would have to be, but I'm pretty sure it's enough to convert the stuff in the immediate vicinity to quark-gluon plasma if all the submunitions go off at once.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The first segment of chapter 22; much, much faster than I had expected, and breaking one of the cardinal rules (all right, guidelines) of science fiction- excessive explanation, specifically of the dimension breach device. I know, bad- but speculating about how the thing might work was just so much fun I couldn't help it. So many hostages to fortune, but what the hell.

Sandy Michell tells us virtually nothing about Amberley's yacht apart from that it exists, and that bit is very much from a non- Imperium viewpoint. Anyway,

A Squelch of Empires ch 22 (first scene)

The Externus Exterminatus was an Inquisitor's personal ship, and as such certain things were expected of it. It was outwardly unremarkable, lean and fast, but ordinarily no more so than could reasonably be expected from a fast passenger transport or courier boat.

A private yacht that actually looked like a private yacht would have attracted too much notice; there were such things, but they tended to belong to people who were attention- gatheringly important anyway. Best not.

Underneath the skin, there was a concealed weapon suite more suitable to a first line warship- not especially large, but of the highest available quality; the powerplant wouldn't have disgraced a destroyer, and the little ship contained as many self managing, dark age relics as could be found, meaning it could be operated effectively by a small, close knit group.

The one thing Externus Exterminatus could absolutely not do was pass for a ship of the Galactic Empire. That became obvious about a second after exiting the warp off Research Station Bifrost.


It was actually badly named in one important regard; the giant glowing thing wasn't rainbow, it was predominantly blue.

The station itself was built on the framework of a deepdock complex, laboratory and accommodation and power generator modules replacing slipways, ending on one side in a girderwork cradle for a looming, overwhelming...something.

The wormhole drill consisted of two protective layers, a forcefield globe around a transparisteel sphere, protecting the rest of the universe from an eye- hurting, ever- moving, cherenkov- shining knot of tormented space.

If it wasn't a naked singularity, then it was at most down to very skimpy underwear.

In actual fact, it was a blob of degenerate matter that could be condensed into a such a singularity; fold it into the yau shape of the destination, hammer it with a gravitic soliton, it would implode, and in imploding transcend, connect and form the bridge.


It seemed to fold in and out of itself as the light from it reached the observers, shifting and tumbling through configurations. Was this chaos, many faceted and polymorphic, unrestrained cosmic complexity- or to reach into the maelstrom and enforce the chosen option, bring shape to this, was that not the absolute supremacy of order?

It was beyond the local representatives of the Mechanicus, they could only look at it and raise their hands, certainly couldn't explain it to their companions; and for a moment they all, Inquisitor included, simply gazed at the thing and boggled.

Then the sensor picture hashed over, and they realised the locals must be doing the same to them, scanning and tactical jamming.

A telescopic sweep confirmed the existence of guardships- a reinforced escort squadron, the heaviest craft present a pair of Ecliptic class heavy frigates. Not enough to beat off a serious Imperium attack but more than enough to deal with an Inquisitor's yacht, no matter how many defence lasers it had strapped to it in inconspicuous places.

There were heavier forces held in readiness, but at one remove, a jump away from a device that no-one felt particularly comfortable about the physics or the politics of. Hard to say which was more likely to explode, in fact.


The Imperium party had made numerous plans, ranging from emerging far enough off the facility to hijack a supply ship and sneak in that way to marching up bold as brass and demanding to see the entity in charge, through pretending to be a delegation from the local environmental society, and many shades of directness in between.

This hadn't been part of the plan. Too close in- an almost inevitable navigation error in the warp as it was here. Too obvious, no preparation time, guns already starting to point on to them. There were only moments for a decision, and the Inquisitor made it.

'Run derelict.' Amberley ordered. 'We can't fight our way in, make them come out to investigate us.'

The flight crew obeyed, cycling the ship's systems down as fast and as raggedly as they dared, trying to look like automatic systems- easy enough for the servitors for obvious reasons, they practically were already.


The Inquisitor's luck held, to begin with; the first team to board the slow- drifting yacht were Naval Security troopers, who were, charitably, not the best of men- being those who failed the physical requirements for the regular army, the loyalty requirements for compforce or the marines, and the intelligence requirements for starship crew.

They neither had the knowledge of hulls and systems of navy regulars, or the discipline and diligence of stormtroopers. They were also severely spooked by what Amberley would have described as the 'comforting and relaxing' ambience of her ship.

From the point of view of the monochrome- accustomed navy troopers, it was a nightmare stroll through a chamber of horrors. The scenes of carnage and servile devotion to inhuman monsters on the walls- or in other words, the glorious victories of the Imperium and the power and pageantry of the Imperial state.

It was rather easy to mistake most Imperium high officials for inhuman monsters, after all..


The pictures and hangings, the celebrations of the magnificence of tyranny and the honour and glory heaped on the triumph of death and the mortality of man, ever- present skulls and murdering angels- they were spooked half out of their minds before they came across the first shambling cyborg zombie.

From a certain point of view, that was exactly what a servitor was; other points of view could have been far harsher- a refined, scientific sadism and a crime against humanity, for one.

Inquisitor Vail was not a sadist or a monster, but she was a woman of her world and her time, and they had been doing such things for so long that they had entirely forgotten that they were a brutality and a betrayal.

The naval boarding party saw this deformed, abused and tortured post- human shambling towards them and screamed 'Zombie!' They laid into the poor, confused environmental systems maintenance drone with all they had.


They had been given hardly any briefing at all, no proper account of the incident, but they had all heard the scuttlebutt relating to the Battle of the Rishi Mouth, and how the supposed derelicts there had devoured unit after unit that had been fed into them.

Rather than waste any more stormtroopers and fleet troopers, the Moff had asked the local systems for military contribution. There were a trickle of voulnteers the first time he asked- and none at all the second.

Inquisitor Vail, as might be expected, had large sections of her own ship wired for sound and vision- just in case. In case of cases like this, in fact.

The navy troopers had begun in full on action movie mode; a translator, had one been present, would have found it difficult not to laugh themselves silly at the navy troopers' attempts to keep their morale up; they had begun by walting their way in, spewing action movie quotes at each other and trying to sound macho and confident.

That hadn't lasted further than the first corridor junction, and they were nervous wrecks by the time the first squad came up against an actual servitor of the Imperium.


The score in that action was two to one to the Imperium, from an unarmed, lobotomised, combat- incapable servitor. One naval trooper, unable to deploy properly and firing past his squadmates, put an E-11 bolt into the back of a head. One man fired a grenade at too close a range, and the fragmentation took the squad leader's eye out.

They were still recovering from the shock of that when there was more com chatter- a set of terrible screams, followed by more gunfire, explosions, retching. Inquisitor Vail kept a small flower garden; the gardener- servitors at least had sharp things, and it wasn't as if the naval troopers weren't viable candidates for deadheading after all.

Another explosion, a sharp electric sound followed by screams and a damp sizzle; the team that had gone for the bridge- one of them had made the mistake of stepping into the navigation booth/pool. The mutated, warp- contaminated thing that had stepped out had been met with all possible weapons- including a small thermal charge thrown into the pool. Live steam had done the rest.


There were new voices overheard- not that the ship's systems could hack incoming comms, but the audio pickups were good enough to hear earpiece radio and outgoing voice from the boarders. The voices were authority, the naval boarding party being shouted at.

'Now, where did I leave that linguafiche? Ah, we have praxitely.' Mott announced, and began translating the chatter of the Galactic Empire boarding party- only just in time.

'This is MILDIR,' pronounced with such measured, primary stress even a non-native speaker could tell it was an acronym, 'do not, repeat do not, dock anything larger than a boarding shuttle to that ship, or allow it to dock to the station.'


There was a burst of crosstalk, made hazy for being doubly off- mike, but it seemed to be an argument. 'A genuine alien artifact,the xenophysics, the xenobiology, study, science, the entire point of the project-'

There were other like noises of agreement, cut short by the military director saying 'Remember the Death Star Incident? Think about the rescue/intrusion, think about that ship as an intelligent actor rather than a dataset, think about what it might be here for, and tell me I'm not being unusually generous to you by not ordering it blown to stang here and now.'


There was more crosstalk that ended in a sensible question; 'Then why did we board it in the first place?'

'We need study and science, and maybe military intelligence most of all. We are going to tractor- pin that thing, field englobe it, and study the everloving kriff out of it under full biohazard procedure. Anyone and anything that comes out of that ship is decontaminated, start with the wounded-'

'Countermanded.' Another voice. 'Hard dock the thing for a full sweep.'

'Excuse me? On what grounds?' the military director bristled.


'Operational necessity. We simply do not have the time, there is no evidence so far of any unusual threat of accidental contamination, and if they were using biochem you would already be dead.' Amberley couldn't recognise the voice, but the facility military director wasn't arguing.

'That's not exactly a reassuring option; that ship is where it is and behaving as it is for a reason. We-'

'Senior Lieutenant, the pressure of events is too great and the time we need to play it safe does not exist. Fast and dirty is how it has to be. Smash through whatever ambushes they have prepared, take prisoners if you can, and get all possible intelligence to me at once.'

'Yes, sir, admiral, sir.' there was a click noise, and a further comment- 'Right, lock down the cosmic silly-putty, somebody disconnect the self destruct, tell the Marines to update their wills, and bring the thing in.'

[Singular Quartet]

This will only get messier if Amberly has her power armor with her.

[Vehrec]

Messier for her. That's the Lieutenant from Black Prince who'll be running this boarding party and security show. Somebody's going to be running inertial controls up to security before too long.

[Kartr_Kana]

That's the Lieutenant from Black Prince who'll be running this boarding party and security show.

Are we sure it's the LT from the Black Prince? Shouldn't he be on the other side of the wormhole with his ship?

Not complaining if it is, cause the only named Marine Lt from Black Prince so far is yours truly IIRC. It'd be nice to get some action, only problem is last time I was a Space Trooper. Wonder if I ever did attach one of those lasers we found on the Rebel ship to my armor?

[Thanas]

^Mini proton torpedoes would probably be a great choice for boarding an Imperium ship.

[starfury]

Even so, they're about the most effective thing the Imperium Navy has to offer. The way I'm mentally modelling this, standard batteries are designed to fill an area with firepower to catch a distant, manoeuvring target, a shotgun blast where each 'pellet' might be a multi-ton nuclear shell, or it's energy equivalent in plasma, laser, melta fire. Fine, but the amount of empty space that gets strafed on the off chance, energy density over area- it's not really good enough to do much to the Imperial Starfleet, or any serious warship thereof. Not useless, but an uphill struggle to make it useful.

Missiles and fighters are so big and slow by comparison, they are genuinely useless. Lances, on the other hand, are comparable to medium- high end HTL, roughly achieving parity as an effective weapon, Astartes bombardment cannon are slightly over parity with most of the Imperial Starfleet's armament- they're heavy demolition mass drivers that can also be used ship to ship, and they're vicious. (Gothic rules reference; use firepower table, ignore armour, hit on 4+always, crit on 4+)

Nova cannon fire a single very large projectile whose detonation imitates a small sun or a very, very large nuclear fireball, briefly. The most lethal thing about it is actualy the kinetics- one shot more or less wrote off the Imperial battlecuiser Irreversible in the Battle of the Rishi Mouth, ripping and severely shocking the structure and scattering fragments of unexploded warhead throughout the ship. You can bet that incident got closely studied.

Irreversible, incidentally, is the ship that 'overran' Amberley's yacht, on her way back to a main dockyard for repair if possible or scrappage if not.

If this is the case, I find it ironic then that Chaos ships and fleets, which tend to normally hold a advantage over the more rigid and specialized imperium fleet would have much harder time facing Star wars ships which can shrug off their strong weapon fire and massace their fighter and bomber swarms. Since What I typically hear of BFG was that it easier to win with chaos then imperial forces gun duels and spamming ordanace, the imperium being much more reliant on their special weapons like the Nova cannons and Torpedos.

[Simon_Jester]

By the way, ECR, I'd like to hear more on your reasoning for saying that 40k fleets tend to try and saturate the enemy with area fire at long range. Is that straight out of the books, or inferred?

If this is the case, I find it ironic then that Chaos ships and fleets, which tend to normally hold a advantage over the more rigid and specialized imperium fleet would have much harder time facing Star wars ships which can shrug off their strong weapon fire and massace their fighter and bomber swarms. Since What I typically hear of BFG was that it easier to win with chaos then imperial forces gun duels and spamming ordanace, the imperium being much more reliant on their special weapons like the Nova cannons and Torpedos.

Not surprising; Chaos specializes in fighting the Imperium.

Conversely, one of ECR's major themes here is just how... warped, and I use the term advisedly, the Imperium has become by the ten thousand year civil war against a Chaos-tainted version of its own social structure. Chaos is their number one opponent, really; most of the others only appeared on the galactic scene recently or lack the scale to be a major threat. The only competitor Chaos has is the Orks, and the doctrinal solution to Orks is simple: stand off and "slosh them with Martinis." Fighting Chaos is much more difficult, because they pose a threat on more levels.

The problem, of course, is that you can make a case that some of the ways the Imperium has adapted to the Long War against Chaos have actually impeded its ability to do so, or at least done as much harm as good...

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Short update, just to provide evidence of not- death; this one did actually change firection mid- scribble, and I bet you can spot where, too.


This is why the Imperial system exists, Lennart thought. To make moves and manoeuvres like this possible. Instant, total, unquestioning obedience at the bottom means the being at the top can change his mind at a moment’s notice, revise plans on the spur of the moment, reimagine and re-envision like lightning.

Total obedience at the lower echelons creates total maneuverability at the command level. All precedent overturned, any plan becomes feasible. And if I wasn’t so busy, I’d be crapping myself thinking through the implications of that, he thought.

It also creates- or at least it damned well ought to- create total responsibility. I’m responsible for them, I need to keep as many of them alive as possible, and I’m damned if I can see a way of doing it. Actually, add keeping them from being damned as a secondary objective, in this space.

What constitutes a sensible plan under these circumstances?


For a start, I can stop kidding myself that this can be done without paying in blood. There are going to be losses whatever way we do it, we don’t have the hardware, or the luxury of unlimited time to be subtle with it.

‘Rapid three wave, light fighters, light gun craft, close quarters jump and strafe then break, draw the defending fighters out, second wave jump capable torpedo craft conduct defence suppression then move to support first wave withdrawal;

third wave torpedo and heavy gun small craft, nonjump torpedo fighters, ordnance attack in support of capital action- main weapon mounts the priority, targeters, sensors, manoeuvre engines secondary. Nonjump gun fighters follow the ordnance in and strafe.’

Simple and quite generic, practical, and also bloody dangerous. What were the psychological, what were the psychic factors? Were any of the defending pilots deconvertible- had they turned as renegade as their parent ship? Where’s Maarek Stele when you need him?


Blistmok was zig- zagging, turning and twisting like a living thing…and there was a frightening thought, how thoroughly had she been changed? The victim/property of the Lord of Change, it only stood to reason- which there was nothing strictly preventing chaos form doing when the mood took it- that it had been radically altered.

As what, to what? From the way the ship was behaving, like a living thing, if the computer and droid systems had been corrupted- how well were their conditioned reflexes in place?

If it was now living, if it had been brought to sentience, then that could be a vulnerability worth exploiting. Had the crew been joined with it in some way? A collective entity? If so- that could be complex.

What would it want, this entity? What did they stand to gain- what would they understand that they stood to gain?


If I was in their position, I…ah, Lennart thought, and tried to divide his brain into two halves. There was a solution that presented itself, a radical, ridiculously dangerous idea that could save thousands, perhaps millions.

The way that thing was manoeuvring, it was so busy being that it hadn’t emotionally stabilised yet; was still revelling in it’s own internal processes of change. It hadn’t done it’s thinking yet.

How to organise this…’Brenn, stand by to clear the bridge module down to auxiliary control. 17-Blue, Commissar, Farseer, Brother- Sargeants, I’m going to need your help. Thon, tell the chief I’m probably going to need his help too.’ That was to the engineering liaison on the bridge, Lieutenant- Commander Thon Sperrin, who had relatively little to do in normal circumstances.

‘Surgeon- commander, get down to the bubble- you’re far too vulnerable for this.’ She looked more hurt by his reversion to formality than anything else, after all they had been inside each other’s minds, but she caught a fragment of what he was intending and realised why.


Brenn guessed it, as well. ‘Skipper- you’re seriously going to try and lightning rod that thing? Draw whatever’s possessing it out onto us using yourself as bait, fight it here?’

‘And for bonus points, tell me why it was a bad idea to say that out loud.’ Lennart said, thankful that at least he had switched to Galactic Standard in doing so rather than Basic, which their guests might have picked up a few words of by now. ‘Anyone who isn’t an up close and personal combat- wombat ought not to be here for this. Kriffit, I’m thinking of leaving.’

Brenn nodded to one of the bridge console ops, one of the engineering- liaison section monitoring power flow; the leading spaceman reached for the bucket of icecubes and threw it at their commanding officer.


Gunner Jurgen looked slightly envious; on one hand, cold, then again on the other hand water. Commissar Cain looked perplexed. He did indeed have a few words of Basic by now, could at least recognise that they spoke Standard when they didn’t want to be understood. ‘Is this some sort of strange victory ritual among your people?’

‘No,’ Lennart deadpanned, between shaking icecubes out of his hair, ‘I asked him to do that to me when I said or did something that made it look as if I was going mad.’

‘Ah.’ The commissar said, and packed several other questions into the syllable.

‘Yep.’ Lennart said, grinning like the lunatic he was ruefully aware he had to be on some level to want to do this. ‘He was perfectly right to do so, too, but if there’s a more elegant way to do this- actually, I can see it, but it’s even more risky.’


Lennart could guess what was going through the Commissar’s head. He could tell that he was thinking “What’s the worst that could happen?”- and so used to the worst actually happening was he, the potential dooms flickering through his head were fairly close to the truth.

The Caledonian guessed the truth, too, and the Farseer started backing away in horror. 'I do not believe that this will be effective.' she said, raising her staff and wondering who to hit with it.

'An' ye claim tae be the one wha' can see the future, an' a'.' Fergus commented. 'Is he goin'tae dae what I think he's goin'tae dae- an' is it ower late tae put in for a transfer tae' ra Grey Knights?'

'Yes, Brother- Sargeant. To both questions.' The farseer replied. 'But he will not be persuaded out of it.'


'I could resent that, you know.' Lennart said, watching the fighter attack develop. 'You're implying that I'm impervious to reason.'

'Is this,' she said gesturing at the Pit and meaning what was about to happen rather than what was happening now, 'the act of a reasonable being?'

'There's no other calculated risk, no personal action that could be taken-' Lennart noticed, if no-one else did, that he had avoided using the pronoun “I”- that if it comes off would achieve so much.'

'But the potential cost- you could lose everything. You are critical here. Irreplaceable.' The eldar farseer said, and Lennart had to wonder which plan she was talking about, his or hers.


To prevent his slower- witted colleague deciding to resolve his confusion with bolt shells the Caledonian Astartes said 'Whit de ye think they dae?' gesturing vaguely at 17-Blue's long rifles and squad automatics.

Brother- Sargeant Andraste was doctrinaire and hostile to much of the strangeness going on around him, but he was not stupid enough not to notice that he was being distracted.

'They are presumably devices for killing things, Brother- Sargeant, and unless you have a full briefing on them to offer your bringing them up is a device to distract me from something you know no loyal Astartes could approve of.'

'Aye, well, don't say I didnae' warn ye.'


Lennart snapped back at the farseer 'Now that is definitely an insult- I've trained my people better than that, they know their jobs.' He seemed genuinely annoyed, and she sensed that he would react badly to being goaded, and even more unpredictably to reverse psychology.

Instead of challenging him directly, she said 'We have waited millennia for the appearance of a reasonable man.'

Lennart chose to react sideways to that. 'Commissar, that sounds like your cue- have you ever wanted to be promoted to xenos messiah?'

He was obviously starting to get the hand of things around here; he didn't even twitch- visibly- before replying, dryly, 'As interesting and unusual as it might be, I think the Administratum would object.' Not to mention the Eccleisarchy, the Munitorum, the Commissariat...


'Skipper, I think she has a point.' Brenn said. 'I'm no psychic warrior, I don't know the ins and outs of this- but last time I checked, neither were you, and you were trying very hard not to learn.'

He sounded genuinely concerned, and Lennart decided he deserved a proper answer.

'Well, I've got no choice now, and look at that and tell me we don't need every trick possible. Chances are, we'll have to fight the wibbly gribbly-' everyone from the local universe glared at him.

'Look, I am trying not to do the thing honour by referring to it by it's proper name. You can call it a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch, a Changer of the Ways, if you like, but I can't think of anything it's more relevant to dehumanise and demonise than a kriffing inhuman daemon. You tiptoe around these things when open hatred might serve you better.'


Ignoring their objections, he carried on 'It will need destroyed if we are to reclaim Blistmok, we need to retake at least one of them if we are to stand a reasonable chance against the other two. There are only so many flukes I can pull out of the hat- and tell me, was that easy?' he added to Brenn.

Obviously, he meant dancing with the Khornate battlecruiser. 'No- but it was much easier than it ought to have been, because they had problems with their heads.' Brenn said. 'I think we've all guessed what you have in mind.'

'We are going to have to resort to psychic combat, and I'd much rather do that here on my home ground, with all possible advantages, than wander into it's den.' Lennart confirmed.

Although, he was already half convinced otherwise- Brenn's gut feeling was clearly dead against this, and he was struggling to articulate it, put it into sensible words. Lennart waited for him to manage it.


'Don't these things have a nasty habit of emerging inside people's heads?' Brenn managed, eventually.

Lennart turned to the rating with the empty bucket. 'Throw that damn' silly thing away.' he said. And as the rating turned to leave the bridge he added 'And get a hose, I might need it. On balance, I think your logic has merit.' he added to Brenn.

'Emotionally it fits, operationally it would be the next best thing to suicidal. I think the psychic background noise around here must have some effect, after a while, if I was prepared to seriously contemplate a bloody stupid move like that.'


Which, he didn't add out loud, still leaves us with the problem of what the hell else to do- or possibly a worse problem, if the god of change just tried to fake me out by subconsciously prompting me to invite it in. Oh, it would love me to believe I can't trust my own judgement any more.

The farseer was looking at him open- jawed. 'What's the problem, haven't you ever seen a man change his mind before?' She still looked blank. 'Galactic Spirit, you really haven't, have you? Right, “destroy the universe” has just moved up a couple of places on my to do list.'

She looked completely baffled; she had missed the briefing where Lennart had explained- or at least caused the Imperium to think what he wanted them to- about wormholes.


Lennart's hovertrain of thought rambled on; never mind the psychics for now, if there's a way of bluffing the powers of Chaos with the same idea- they know what the crews of the 401st BCS knew, and I don't think they were fully briefed, so...

Actually, major calibre weapons- what will they reasonably be expecting from us? What worked last time, what would it make sense to try to repeat, if I can use that as the bait for a trap, obviously, well the crew of Custos Sempiternus aren't going to be ecstatic about it- actually, that is the one thing they might well be. Sensible, on the other hand, that I can rule out.

Bluffing with wormholes is, well, call that plan C. They should at least react predictably to the feint- correction, predictably or suboptimally. That can let us get a boarding party on board at least.

[Simon_Jester]

Instead of challenging him directly, she said 'We have waited millennia for the appearance of a reasonable man.'

You know, this would work BEAUTIFULLY in closer proximity with:

The farseer was looking at him open- jawed. 'What's the problem, haven't you ever seen a man change his mind before?' She still looked blank. 'Galactic Spirit, you really haven't, have you?...'

I'm half suggesting you edit the scene to do it, because I think it would mesh so well.