The Open Door (megacrossover)

[Setesh]

Its a delivery system for sensory chaos slime.

Hmmm, talk about giving pleasure with a tongue

........I DEFINITIVELY didn't wanted that kind of images on my head, bloody damnit!!

And that is the whole point.

[Academia Nut]

Chapter Twenty-six: Guest

There were two kinds of daemon bound to physical objects under the new system of Chaos. The first and most common were made from the souls of those who pissed off the gods but not quite enough to warrant getting sent to the Hall of Torment, guys like child abusers and the like. They were turned into very minor entities and stuck into things like swords and such, the idea being that spending a couple of centuries as an inanimate object would get them to shape up, and if they didn’t, well at least they were well away from other souls and doing something semi-useful.

Then there were the few souls who volunteered to get the process done to them. It was pretty rare that there were positions open, but with the commissioning of the Stiletto there were a variety of places where a person looking for a shot at immortality could find work. For Lars, being turned into an incorporeal entity and stuffed into a communications mast for a few hundred years beat out being eaten by the gods upon his death.

That was of course until his perch had been shorn off the Stiletto and he had been sucked into a Warp rift and hurled across the multiverse.

Fortunately for him, since he had volunteered he had actually been given a healthy measure of knowledge about what it meant to be a daemon and thus how to survive on his own. All of the prisoner daemons would dissipate once their container was destroyed, but for Lars, he still had a chance to get back home.

If he could figure out where home was. He had hit the Warp pretty hard and his mast had bounced across the multiverse for quite a while until it had hit something that finally disintegrated the material component and sent him tumbling out into the Warp. Unfortunately, while the analogy was a bit crude, the reason he hadn’t jumped from the mast in the first place was that he had been moving very ‘fast’ through the Immaterium and he could have easily been ripped apart by the shock.

Thus when he finally did exit that which he had been bound to, it was less like a fighter pilot ejecting from a damaged aircraft and more along the lines of a guy being thrown through a windshield from his disintegrating Ferrari in a three hundred kilometre per hour roll over.

Thus when Lars came to a rest in a plane of existence, he was in a considerable amount of pain and soon blacked out. Considering that he didn’t exactly have a body properly capable of feeling pain or with the biological capacity to pass out, this indicated just how battered he was on a fundamental level.

When Lars had managed to put the battered chunks of his essence back into proper alignment and consciousness returned to him, he discovered that he had assumed a corporeal form, one based on his old, mortal body. This worried him a bit at first, but he had been warned that in some realms such things were possible, and it didn’t seem likely that he was going to dissipate any time soon.

It was also obvious that wherever he had ended up, someone had been taking care of him as he was in a room, lying on a futon on the floor, with a set of clothing set aside for him. Getting up, he considered the clothing for a moment. They looked to be from a reasonably advanced culture, although they were perhaps a bit too small for him. Then again he was in an unknown universe and he wasn’t about to forget the first rule of survival.

There are some places where there are beings that can squash a daemon like a bug. If you find yourself in an unknown place, assume there are such beings about and thus be polite. Be polite to a fault. Do not engage in senseless acts of violence. Do not give any excuse to any deific being to try and kill you and then find out where you came from. You are a guest, so act like one.

Lars really, really hoped that he was in a nice, peaceful place with few gods so that he could just start looking for home instead of having to explain that no, he wasn’t in fact the vanguard for a daemonic invasion, but considering his luck that seemed unlikely at this point.

Slipping on the clothing, he found that it was a little too small, but fortunately just in the height department and not in any way that would pinch uncomfortably. True, such concerns were ultimately meaningless, but it could still be annoying.

Taking in his surroundings, he quickly ascertained that he was probably somewhere in Japan. Somehow Earth and its cultures could be copied endlessly throughout the cosmos, but no one really knew why. Then again, the gods seemed interested in human cultures because they were easier to work with, so humanity’s cradle showing up repeatedly was not too much of a stretch if you considered that they were actively looking for it. Still, finding a copy randomly seemed… strange

Sliding the door to his room open, he glanced about the hallway and found no one around. He said in a soft by audible voice, “Hello? Is anyone home? It’s me, the strange naked guy you found and took in. I’m up.”

Hearing no reply, Lars stepped out into the hall and cracked open one of the sliding doors to see if it led outside, to a main living area, or just to another room. He quickly closed it again, as it was definitely a room, apparently the living space of an apothecary or something judging by the large array of cabinets filled with bottles and boxes and the presence of a couple of mortars and pestles.

Checking another door, he found a cross between a living space and some sort of high tech machine shop littered with mechanical and computer parts. The next door proved to be to a more regular looking room, although the decorations suggested that the occupant was interested in motorcycles, while door number four featured a room that was just generally well kept.

Finally he managed to find a door that led out of the habitation area and into what appeared to be the living room/family room area where there was a modest sized cathode ray tube television and some chairs and sofas. Wandering a bit more, Lars eventually managed to find his way outside, where he discovered a short, round, almost wooden-soldier like robot standing guard over the compound.

Blinking a few times at this rather incongruous sight, Lars said, “Oh, hello. I guess I was brought in by the people of this place. Would you happen to know where they are? And if you are included amongst their number, then no offence was meant, it is just that you are giving off a very good appearance of being a devoted guard at the moment.”

The robot looked up at him and pointed down a set of stone stairs. Nodding, Lars said, “Thank you,” before descending to find a young man working away at a motorcycle with attached sidecar. Clearing his throat in a polite manner, Lars said, “Uh, hello?”

Looking up, the young man said, “Oh, you’re awake! We thought you would be asleep a bit longer so we were doing some errands. Sorry we weren’t in the house.”

“Oh, uh, no need to worry, I’m pretty hardy,” Lars said with a shrug. Technically the only thing he had to fear was anything capable of unmaking him, so if it didn’t kill him outright he had little to worry about in the long term.

“You were pretty badly hurt when we first found you, but you do seem much better now. Anyway, my name is Morisato Keiichi, and come on with me; I’ll fix you up something to eat. You’ve been asleep for two days, so you must be starving,” Keiichi said with a bright smile.

“Oh, thank you Keiichi, but I uh… alright, I need to know how you’ll react, so I’ll need to know whether or not that robot guard is normal around here,” Lars asked somewhat nervously.

“Oh, Banpei? He’s uh… experimental… yeah, experimental,” Keiichi said while nervously scratching the back of his head.

“So not at all normal, as in you deal with weird things on a regular basis… like say strange men suddenly appearing by your house in such a way that you choose to take care of them there instead of taking them to a hospital,” Lars said.

“Umm… yeah. I’m guessing that you know that you’re umm… not human,” Keiichi nervously pointed out.

“Yeah, so don’t worry about it. Besides, I’m more worried that you would be offended or spooked, I am the interloper here. But anyway, I don’t need to eat… at least not in the way you do,” Lars explained.

“Oh, I see. Sorry…” Keiichi began.

“No, no, no! I thank you for the offer; I just don’t want you to waste your food on someone who has no need for it. Also, please excuse me, but I have yet to introduce myself. My name is Lars,” Lars explained.

“Ah yes. Well, Lars-san, most of the rest of the household should be home soon, so we should head in,” Keiichi said.

“Oh, please don’t let me distract you from your own work, although I can understand that you might not want a stranger having free access to your home. Perhaps I could help you with your bike first?” Lars offered.

Keiichi smiled and said, “I would appreciate that Lars-san, if you think you would be of help.”

Shrugging, Lars said, “I’m more familiar with large maritime engines, but I think I can be of assistance.”

Keiichi blinked and he asked, “You know about machines.”

Shrugging, Lars said, “It depends on the subject area. You want me to work on a diesel engine for a commercial fishing ship? I’m your man. You need me to get a finicky naval radio working, I can help you out. I also know a bit about military grade communication and navigation gear.” The fact that the reason behind that last one was because he had been bound to the gear was left out.

“You’re a sailor?” Keiichi asked in interest.

“I used to be. Times change… it’s a bit of a long story that probably only needs to be told once, so we should wait until there are more people to hear the tale. Anyway, what exactly is the trouble with your bike?” Lars said, quickly moving the subject into more comfortable ground.

“Oh, it’s nothing major; I’m just giving the Beemer a tune up. Changing the oil, cleaning the spark plugs, that sort of thing. I’m already almost finished,” Keiichi said.

Squatting down next to the bike, Lars looked over it and said, “Nice, you’re really taking care of this baby. Although I can see from the varying ages of the parts that this old girl has been through quite the number of scrapes.”

Keiichi laughed nervously at that and said, “Bad luck seems to follow me wherever I go.”

“We make our own luck kid. Even if the universe seems intent on giving us a bad hand at every turn, even if the gods themselves are out to get you, we can still make our own fate. Looking at this bike, I would say that you’ve had a lot of problems thrown your way, but the fact that you are still here to fix it tells me that you’ve made some really good luck for yourself,” Lars said, growing sentimental. Despite his outward appearance of being in the prime of his life, he had been quite grizzled when he had made his decision to cheat death.

Third Impact had not been kind to him.

Shaking away the bad memories, Lars picked up a piece and said, “Well enough sentimentality from an old man. Let’s get to finishing the job you started.”

For about half an hour the two of them worked quietly, two experienced men doing a job they were good at, and Lars marvelled at the peaceful intensity Keiichi put into his work. He was the sort of quiet, dependable man of incredible patience and compassion who Lars would really not want to have to talk about his employers. Lars had long ago come to peace with the gods, but trying to explain his culture to such a peaceful young man from what appeared to be a peaceful universe would be… awkward to say the least.

Then Lars’ senses began to tingle with the approach of a being on incredible power. Maybe not quite the same amount of power as say one of the major Daemon Nobility like Princess Hikari, but considering the fact that the feeling was also very different in its texture as well as its magnitude, Lars felt that even that impression might be off. Either way he would probably get ripped apart if he stepped out of line around this approaching being.

Sighing, he stood up and looked to where he felt the entity approaching from, and wondered why one of the big shots from this region had not shown up already. Keiichi noticed this as he was packing away his tools and asked, “What is it?”

“Something of incredible power is coming this way,” Lars explained.

Frowning, Keiichi looked down the street before a young woman rounded the corner and his face broke out into a broad smile and he said, “Oh, that’s just Belldandy-sama!”

It took Lars a second to recognize the fact that the woman he was looking at was also the source of the power he was feeling, and then he could just goggle in surprise at the way the two were greeting each other in such a familial way. Keiichi was clearly mortal and not a particularly impressive example of a mortal either, but here he was waving happily to a woman who could probably erase the planet from existence if she tried hard enough.

“Ah, Keiichi-san, I see our guest is awake. I hope you’re feeling better today. My name is Belldandy,” the young woman said, a bright, cheerful smile on her face, accentuated by the odd geometric facial markings and her long brown hair that framed everything so nicely. Then, incongruously enough, there were a few bags of groceries in her hands. Lars figured that she could probably just will such things into existence, and yet she had gone shopping.

Stumbling over himself, Lars plastered a somewhat terrified smile on his face and said, “Ah, hello. My name is Lars, and I thank you for your hospitality.”

Her smile turning into something of frown/pout, Belldandy asked, “Lars-san, you’re frightened. Why?”

“Well… err… you see… you see, I can feel just how powerful you are Belldandy… uh… sama would be the correct suffix I think… and it intimidates me,” Lars admitted.

“Lars-san, don’t be frightened of Belldandy-san,” Keiichi said in protest. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Holding up his hands in warding, Lars said, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean any offence, it’s just like… well… an ant being able to comprehend an elephant. No matter how gentle the elephant, it is still so much enormously larger than the ant that it can’t help but feel intimidated.”

“Please don’t be afraid Lars-san, I’ll try to better to hide my power,” Belldandy said conciliatorily.

Shaking his head, Lars said, “I don’t think that is possible. I’m a uh… the technical term is a psychophage, in my case a panpsychophage, but a more understandable if less accurate term would be ‘emotion eater’. I naturally consume ambient emotions and psychic emanations, so I am attuned to noticing those sorts of things. You, Belldandy-sama, shine like a star to me, so I will just have to accommodate to you.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I’ll try not to shine too brightly then,” Belldandy said. “And please, call me Belldandy-san, or just plain Belldandy.”

“Ah, thank you,” Lars said.

Talking a bag of groceries from Belldandy, Keiichi followed her up the stairs to their home, with Lars following in some degree of confusion and trepidation behind.

Once inside, Belldandy and Keiichi went about preparing dinner. A moment after starting, Keiichi added on, “Oh yes, we won’t need to make as much tonight. Lars-san said that he doesn’t need to eat.”

“Oh? If you don’t mind asking, you said that you eat ‘emotions’ Lars-san, could you explain a bit more about that,” Belldandy asked sweetly. Keiichi clearly missed it, but as a daemon Lars was much more sensitive to the subtleties of emotion that could come off a person. Right now Belldandy was saying, ‘Hurt Keiichi here and I’ll introduce you to an eternity of pain.’

“Uh… it’s fairly complex, but it suffices to say that the majority of my daily diet is derived simply from ambient emotion. I don’t actually have the capacity to ‘drain’ the emotions out of a person, and that would be counter-productive in the long term. So don’t worry, I’m not any kind of monster or something like that,” Lars explained hastily.

“So, what, you get sustenance from just being around people?” Keiichi asked curiously.

“Basically. So long as I’m around most kinds of sentient organic life I’ll never starve, as I need very little to sustain myself unless I’m doing heavy activity. Obviously the stronger the emotion and the more people being emotional, the more energy for me,” Lars explained a bit more thoroughly.

“Any emotion?” Belldandy asked, just the hint of suspicion in her voice.

Nodding, Lars said, “Yes, any emotion. But no, while a riot or war would fuel me with copious amounts of things like anger and fear and hatred and despair and the like, it’s toxic for me in the long run. My kind needs to get a balanced diet or we’ll eventually go insane. There are a few more specialized psychophages where I come from, but they are somewhat more limited and even they need to eat from a spectrum rather than just one type. My people are actually very interested in maintaining healthy, if expressive, populations of people. We’re not bogeymen.”

“Oh. That’s interesting. I’ve never heard of any spirits quite like that before though,” Belldandy said while chopping up ingredients.

“I’m kind of lost,” Lars admittedly with a sheepish shrug. “I’m not from around here.”

Smiling, Belldandy said in a happy, earnest tone, “Well, wherever you’re from, you were taught excellent manners.”

“Ah… thank you Belldandy-san,” Lars said, glad that he had apparently satisfied her curiosity.

“Oh, Keiichi, could you fetch me some whole wheat flour from the pantry? We appear to be out over here,” Belldandy said, causing Keiichi to nod and say, “Of course.”

Once Keiichi was safely out of earshot Belldandy narrowed her eyes and asked in the nicest manner possible, “I can feel other voices emanating off of you, suppressed, enslaved ones. And psychophage means ‘soul eater’, not ‘emotion eater’. So can you explain that to me?”

His eyes going wide with fright, Lars said in a hushed, strained voice, “Look! My existence is complex, but I’m really not here to hurt anyone you love or care about, nor am I a scout for some evil daemonic army. I’m just a guy trying to make the most out of my situation. And… and the souls in me aren’t enslaved. Not in the way you would think.”

“So you do have the souls of others in you,” Belldandy said, somehow becoming infinitely more threatening without her appearance changing from that of a sweet, loving young woman.

“I’m not from around here. Things are very different where I come from. Please, let me explain!” Lars begged in terror.

“I am Belldandy, Goddess First Class, Unlimited License, Norn of the Present, and I know every last part of Creation, every last plane of existence. There is no place for things to be ‘very different’, a place where soul eating would be acceptable,” Belldandy said while looming over Lars.

Before Lars could begin blubbering her words clicked with him, and he instead blinked and asked, “Wait, where am I?”

This seemed to take Belldandy off guard because she asked, “What?”

“Seriously, I thought that you were an experienced extra-dimensional traveller, but unless I’m really lost you should know that there are some places in the multiverse where things are rather unpleasant for the normal people,” Lars stated.

Belldandy started to frown at him, but he was fortunately saved by Keiichi showing up with the flour and her apparent unwillingness to obliterate Lars in front of him. That gave him some time to think.

Okay, he was manifested here, and not stuck in the Warp, or the local equivalent. That was possible, but it required a universe that was capable of manifesting spiritual entities like him. If it did not have sufficient energy to support him or a side plane, then he would have not have been able to appear in this universe at all without being bound to a physical object. No matter how much energy was supplied to him, he simply would have bounced off.

That meant that he couldn’t be very far outside the Great Wall, the outside multiverse just got too thin to support manifesting daemons. In fact, it was more likely that he was still somewhere inside the Great Wall. But Belldandy seemed ignorant of the wider multiverse while still being a dimensional traveller. But that was impossible. Inside the Great Wall you needed a hub universe to move around.

Unless of course this was a hub universe contained by the Great Wall. But with a hub universe you could go anywhere but another hub universe. Surely they should know just how much life sucked for the vast majority of the cosmoses contained by the Great Wall.

Then again, if he had bounced around the Doldrums he might very well have ended up in one of the theorized Z-hubs… but he didn’t think the Borg had hit them that hard. Ugh… he was just glad that his job had given him some degree of multiverse cartography in order to relay messages across the void.

“Can I see a map of your universe?” Lars abruptly asked, causing both Keiichi and Belldandy to pause in confusion.

“What?” Keiichi asked.

“I need a map to try and figure out where I am, and where I’m from. I know you can do that, right Belldandy-san?” Lars asked.

Belldandy looked at him with a slight hint of suspicion before he spoke something in a language that Lars immediately recognized as a cosmic control language of the sort used in psychic incantations, only much more complex and powerful. In the middle of the table Lars was sitting at a holographic image sprang up.

“Oh… shit…” Lars muttered in Swedish. “I am lost. This is nothing like the cartography I’m used to.”

Belldandy blinked and asked, “How can you not know of these places Lars-san?”

Frowning, Lars said, “I’m used to two types of multiverse cartography, inner and outer. Inner is for all of the places inside the Great Wall, while outer is what we theoretically use for stuff outside the Great Wall. If you were using Inner Cartography you would know that there are a lot of places in the multiverse not to touch with a ten foot cattle prod. If you were using Outer Cartography, you would know that there is a whole collection of places that were set aside because no one wanted to touch them with a ten foot cattle prod. But your multiverse map is strangely… contained. You’ve got a home for demons and the like, but everything is more or less all under a central authority. That’s not what my home looks like.”

Keiichi just stared at the holograph dumb founded while Belldandy frowned. Finally, she asked, “Okay, let’s suppose that you are from somewhere outside Creation. How does that explain some of the things I’ve noticed about you?”

“Where I come from, people don’t get an afterlife,” Lars said bluntly.

Belldandy blinked and then asked in horror, “Where do the souls go?”

“Two options: the first is to be absorbed by a being capable of doing such a thing. You don’t exactly survive the process, your identity tends to get subsumed into the commanding spirit, but it mostly beats the second option,” Lars said.

“Which is?” Belldandy asked.

Lars formed both hands into loose fists before sticking them together and then blossomed them out. He said grimly, “They vanish. Poof. Gone. It takes a bit of time, but within a century or two all that is left of most minds is… residue. My deities have been eating the decomposed matter of billions of souls for decades now and show no signs of stopping. Most of the other minds within me come from that process… except for the soul of my wife.”

“You ate the soul of your wife?” Keiichi asked in disbelieving shock.

“Technically one of my gods ate her soul and then regurgitated it into me when I agreed to join them. There was a… a disaster where I came from. Two actually. A lot of people died. Our world was nearly destroyed. We did what we had to do. And I’m not saying that as a fanatic excusing his behaviour, I’m saying that we often literally had no choice in our actions if we didn’t want to go extinct. We live in an extremely hostile universe,” Lars explained with increasing vehemence and passion.

“What did you do?” Belldandy asked, all signs of hostility gone, replaced by the caring, nurturing personality that seemed her default. Even Keiichi seemed eager to help. Lars could feel the emotions radiating off of them, and aside from the welcome boost in energy, he knew that these two were meant for each other despite their wildly differing circumstances.

“Me personally? I was a Danish fisherman whose home was destroyed when some greedy old men blew up Antarctica. Then, fifteen years later after the same old men badly abused a bunch of teenagers into trying to finish off the other half of humanity. Instead, they only absorbed the souls of two-thirds of the global population, my wife being one of them while I survived due to random chance. Their ascension to godhood was costly, half a billion souls each, but worth it. There are… things out there that would not be so merciful. Eventually, when I realized that my time was coming and that I was terrified of ceasing to exist as a person I cut a deal with the gods. I’ll let myself be crammed into an antenna for a few centuries if you ascend me… and I want one of the souls used to power me up to be my wife, so I wouldn’t be away from her ever again,” Lars admitted.

“That’s… that’s impossible. There’s only one Earth in the planes, and we would know about something that damaging,” Belldandy said.

“I’ve seen two Earths. My home and one in another universe. There are lots of Earths scattered about the wider multiverse. I have no idea where your bubble multiverse is in relation, but there is a whole wider set of planes outside the boundaries of your cosmos,” Lars explained.

Before Belldandy could reply to that there was a bright light from the living room and a clearly looking woman with dark skin, pale hair, and a fashion sense that Mislaato would approve of stumbled into the kitchen.

“Urd! I thought you had gone upstairs to get more info on our guest,” Belldandy asked.

Panting from some form of exertion, she said, “I did. Turns out that malfunction in Yggdrasil that Skuld had to take care of was caused by him. According to our data he’s from outside Creation.”

Lars just looked at them and asked, “Do you believe me now?”

---

Okay, before I get into the battle between the Stiletto and the Borg, can I get any theories on you think happened from the data I've given in the past chapters? Your wild mass guessing amuses me. Moreso, it lets me make sure that I'm not completely pulling stuff out of my ass here.

[von Neufeld]

Oh, that was different and interesting.

As for what the Borg did, I would guess that their encounter with Species 8472 made them develop some kind of inter-dimensional technology that was used against the Stiletto.

[dragon]

Wait a minute I thought souls continued to exist after death, after all the Imperials ran into spirts and other such beings before. Or is that just his uiverse where theres no afterlife? And who are these people he ran into.

[phongn]

Wait a minute I thought souls continued to exist after death, after all the Imperials ran into spirts and other such beings before. Or is that just his uiverse where theres no afterlife? And who are these people he ran into.

This last universe is Oh My Goddess!; essentially one normal mechanical engineering student makes a wish and ends up with the Norn of the Present as his girlfriend. Cue her family, enemies and wacky hijinks.

That said, maybe with a little bit of, oh, extra chaos to the mix Keiichi and Beldandy's relationship will finally go somewhere

[holyknight]

Wait a minute I thought souls continued to exist after death, after all the Imperials ran into spirts and other such beings before. Or is that just his uiverse where theres no afterlife? And who are these people he ran into.

It often varied....some souls just survived by the Emperor's grace..others were tainted by the Warp on such a way, that while not exactly daemons, they weren't exactly normal. the rest of the souls just...blends and dissipates into the warp after a time, or seems to go to unknown locations.

The OMG! Universe....Demons(to make a distance from Warp Daemons) and Gods.........It reminds me of the Eldar Deities far before the things started to go deep-south wrong with the Eldar race......although there it's the big difference that Mankind it's quite mortal here, so no chance of billions getting thoroughly bored and going psychotic-druggie....

The only association what i could make with, it's that it's a zone of the D-Multiverse, where somehow, somewhat, the warp was NEVER affected by things like "The War in the Heavens" or such...a universe where the Warp it's like a tranquil and pure milk glass.......where the energies did naturally shift into opposite yet complementary aspects, bringing beings like Kamisama and Hild into creation first, echoing the evolution of Mankind on an accelerated way, being followed by the other Kami and Demons as Mankind finally reached sentience there. A Universe where by sheer dumb luck, only has Mankind as the only sentient species on it.

The Main problem now, it's that Lars's presence, shows that there it's a hole/crack on this transdimensional "bubble".....one that other Warp entities, some NOT as gentle that this guy, will detect as they detect the 'smell' of dear ole Lars on the Immaterium close to this sort of void....

Also, it's the matter, of a very old saying on this case, namely "The curiosity killed the cat".......but twisted, Chaos style of course.

Methinks that Mara, or in this case, SKULD of all things, will poke and dig into the mystery of Lars's arrival into their Universe a bit too much...and the after-effects of this may cause shockwaves on the OMG! like no one has ever seen....

The only way on that this could be worse, it's if the "crack" was caused for a lost fragment of a blood-handed Eldar dude that flew through the multiverse and on a 1-on-a-Million chance hit the bubble and fell on this earth. Now imagine a Kami or Demon finding this fragment and tapping into the shit......and gaining such a boost that it's a potential match for BOTH the Daimakaichou Hild and Kami-Sama, added to the not-so-desirable things like going bonkers given the massive amount of Psychic energy, memories and such stuff from this fragment....

...oh well.....if life gives you lemons, you throw em to his balls and go to buy a coke....

[Robo Jesus]

Wait a minute I thought souls continued to exist after death, after all the Imperials ran into spirts and other such beings before. Or is that just his uiverse where theres no afterlife? And who are these people he ran into.

It often varied....some souls just survived by the Emperor's grace..others were tainted by the Warp on such a way, that while not exactly daemons, they weren't exactly normal. the rest of the souls just...blends and dissipates into the warp after a time, or seems to go to unknown locations.

The OMG! Universe....Demons(to make a distance from Warp Daemons) and Gods.........It reminds me of the Eldar Deities far before the things started to go deep-south wrong with the Eldar race......although there it's the big difference that Mankind it's quite mortal here, so no chance of billions getting thoroughly bored and going psychotic-druggie....

The only association what i could make with, it's that it's a zone of the D-Multiverse, where somehow, somewhat, the warp was NEVER affected by things like "The War in the Heavens" or such...a universe where the Warp it's like a tranquil and pure milk glass.......where the energies did naturally shift into opposite yet complementary aspects, bringing beings like Kamisama and Hild into creation first, echoing the evolution of Mankind on an accelerated way, being followed by the other Kami and Demons as Mankind finally reached sentience there. A Universe where by sheer dumb luck, only has Mankind as the only sentient species on it.

The Main problem now, it's that Lars's presence, shows that there it's a hole/crack on this transdimensional "bubble".....one that other Warp entities, some NOT as gentle that this guy, will detect as they detect the 'smell' of dear ole Lars on the Immaterium close to this sort of void....

Also, it's the matter, of a very old saying on this case, namely "The curiosity killed the cat".......but twisted, Chaos style of course.

Methinks that Mara, or in this case, SKULD of all things, will poke and dig into the mystery of Lars's arrival into their Universe a bit too much...and the after-effects of this may cause shockwaves on the OMG! like no one has ever seen....

The only way on that this could be worse, it's if the "crack" was caused for a lost fragment of a blood-handed Eldar dude that flew through the multiverse and on a 1-on-a-Million chance hit the bubble and fell on this earth. Now imagine a Kami or Demon finding this fragment and tapping into the shit......and gaining such a boost that it's a potential match for BOTH the Daimakaichou Hild and Kami-Sama, added to the not-so-desirable things like going bonkers given the massive amount of Psychic energy, memories and such stuff from this fragment....

...oh well.....if life gives you lemons, you throw em to his balls and go to buy a coke....

Actually, according to OMG! canon (at least what I've heard of it), their universe is a giant computer system. To me, I think that's literal. Like the Matrix, only that someone felt desperate enough to take the souls of all the humans in that verse and dump them into that giant computer system. And Lars just literally crashed into it.

[phongn]

Actually, according to OMG! canon (at least what I've heard of it), their universe is a giant computer system. To me, I think that's literal. Like the Matrix, only that someone felt desperate enough to take the souls of all the humans in that verse and dump them into that giant computer system. And Lars just literally crashed into it.

Yggdrasil runs and maintains the proper workings of the universe, but it is not the universe itself.

EDIT: Also, please excise sections of quotes that are irrelevant to your point.

[Robo Jesus]

Yggdrasil runs and maintains the proper workings of the universe, but it is not the universe itself.

Ahh, that explains that then. A lot of the fans I talked with were vague about that, so I appreciate the correction. Though now I have this mental image of Belldandy replacing Neo in the Matrix stuck in my head.

[Aranfan]

Hmm, I wonder what would happen if Chaos stumbled into the Exalted Universe?

[Mutant Headcrab]

I've personally been thinking what would happen if any of this mess crossed over into the Gurren Lagann universe. What would the Anti-Spiral make of Chaos and vice-versa. Would the Gurren-Dan be corruptible or would they remain stalwart?

Wouldn't a Chaos corrupted Lagann be the coolest thing ever?

[LadyTevar]

Hmm, I wonder what would happen if Chaos stumbled into the Exalted Universe?

Since the Exalted found the Chaotic Primordials and (mostly) defeated them, it would be a place of nearly equivalent power.

[holyknight]

I've personally been thinking what would happen if any of this mess crossed over into the Gurren Lagann universe. What would the Anti-Spiral make of Chaos and vice-versa. Would the Gurren-Dan be corruptible or would they remain stalwart?

Wouldn't a Chaos corrupted Lagann be the coolest thing ever?

Ehhhhh...there it's overkill and there it's OVERKILL. Seriously, while i enjoy TTGL a lot, with it on the fic the things would, forgive me the bad pun, "spiral" outta control so fast that the careful work to make this something worth the effort to read and think, would go down the drain faster than a explosive diarrhoea.

Yggdrasil Its a sort of "Creation's OS Server" what does regulates how Reality and what it's on it works, over all three Planes of existence on OMG, namely Asgard(Heaven) Midgard(Human World) and Nifelheim, though the Nidhogg Sub-System (Underworld/Hell planes). Also it's what keeps the Doublet System, what links the life of each God with a demon, making that if a demon were to slay a god, the demon counterpart of the doublet would die instantly.

Now, something that calls my attention, it's that quite regularly, do appear some "bugs" on the computer.......things without much intelligence...a sort of representation of the random force that it's chaos on existence. What if those bugs were to be irresistibly called to the presence of Lars, to join his being???

PS: Mislaato and Urd. Talk about Epic WIN.

[Gerald Tarrant]

Chapter Twenty-six: Guest

Okay, before I get into the battle between the Stiletto and the Borg, can I get any theories on you think happened from the data I've given in the past chapters?

Did the Borg manage to suck the Stiletto into a [technobabble]trans-warp conduit and collapse it on the ship[/technobabble]?

[holyknight]

Chapter Twenty-six: Guest

Okay, before I get into the battle between the Stiletto and the Borg, can I get any theories on you think happened from the data I've given in the past chapters?

Did the Borg manage to suck the Stiletto into a [technobabble]trans-warp conduit and collapse it on the ship[/technobabble]

More like the Borg did went ape-shit, after so many of the Collective did just "vanish" from it, and did try to deal with it over the world of Syracuse. Likely also the Feds, commanded by Picard were trying to deal with this, likely after the weenies on the commands of the Federation decide a response to the Stiletto's raids.

The Result? High Central FUBAR around the Syracuse system.

Of course, we have a high chance that Tzintchi did foresaw this, and let things happen just to get the max benefit from this, as the dastardly and very subtly manipulator that he is.

PS: Again........Urd and Mislaato meeting? WIN!

[Academia Nut]

Chapter Twenty-seven: New Syracuse

“I must say that I am impressed that you decided to come here,” Rong-Arya noted while idly tracing a clawed finger around the edge of the cup held in their hands, smiling in a shark toothed way at the man sitting across from them. “Although you needn’t be so spooked, we are not monsters, contrary to evidence. We understand what a white flag is and we are not the sort of folks who would shoot people coming to talk about a peace treaty. We might not actually agree to a treaty, but we won’t shoot you for asking.”

“Yes, well, you haven’t exactly been very… talkative over the last year. You have mostly ignored all of our entreaties so far,” Picard noted, his own tea not having been touched yet.

“Actions speak louder than words Picard. You’re the first people to actually come in here, alone, weapons and shields down, broadcasting ‘We want to talk’, rather than sitting back somewhere distant surrounded by lots of guns. And then when we demanded that you come alone and in person, you did so. Most impressive, most impressive. That took the sort of balls we had thought had been excised from your culture,” Rong-Arya said with a smile.

“I felt that under the circumstances it was better to take a risk such as this than continue with the way things had been going,” Picard replied.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Now, tell me what was so damn important that you had to come here for. Is the maelstrom of war too much for you? Have the conflicts finally broken the back of the Federation and now you come here to surrender to us… or is there something else?” Rong-Arya asked, her eyes seeming to burn into Picard’s soul, and he wondered if he was being telepathically analyzed. All accounts said that these people were incredibly skilled psychics, so it did not seem beyond their commander.

“Surrender? No. We take pride in our principles and will stand by them, unto death,” Picard announced.

“An admirable sentiment, although I only wish that you had a better set of principles to stand by. Many Nazis also had principles that they held onto until death,” Rong-Arya replied in a bored tone.

Wincing from that, Picard said, “Let us not get involved in an ideological debate at this juncture, we have a problem. A problem that concerns your people as well.”

“Can you not be grateful for the Dominion fleet we took apart?” Rong-Arya asked before taking a sip of their tea.

“While you did it for your own reasons and the net result was less damage to us than your own raiding, that incident is immaterial to why I am here. I actually disobeyed orders to come here because there are elements in Starfleet who would prefer you dealt with at any cost due to the… destabilizing nature you have been having on our politics, I feel that despite your abominable practices you are less of threat to the Alpha Quadrant than the Borg,” Picard explained.

“The Borg, huh? And are you sure that you aren’t just more afraid of them personally than us?” Rong-Arya asked with a serene smile on their face.

“No, this is definitely beyond just my own hatreds and fears, although I will admit to them. For all the damage you have done, you do not seem concerned with conquest, just raiding and looting and sowing chaos… as it were. The Borg… the Borg, they will exterminate us, perhaps not in body but in the mind. And they come for you,” Picard said.

“And what would you have us do?” Rong-Arya asked, assuming a bored slouch, a hand supporting their tilted head.

“I realize that I can ask you nothing, but I bring with me the location of where they have constructed a transwarp relay point. With this they can rapidly bring large numbers of their ships from their own space into the Alpha Quadrant,” Picard said, pushing forward the data pad he had brought with him.

Picking it up, Rong-Arya went over it and said, “The Briar Patch huh? Eh… maybe those morons will put up a scrap. I will think…” Rong-Arya trailed off as a yeoman walked up to the door of the meeting room and made a gesture indicating that he had an important message.

Nodding, Rong-Arya let the yeoman come forward and whisper his message. Frowning slightly, the daemonhost said, “If you will excuse me, an important matter has come up. We will continue this conversation again once this other matter has been resolved, as it may have some bearing on my next set of actions. Yeoman Hallowell, please escort Captain Picard to his assigned room as a diplomatic guest.”

Getting up, Rong-Arya immediately began to move through the raw stone halls of New Syracuse, the name of the settlement that had been constructed on the moon of Syracuse over the past year. Buried beneath the cratered surface of the airless satellite, tens of thousands of captured Federation, Cardassian, and even a few Klingon personnel worked alongside hundreds of thousands of transplanted Syracusans expanding the base and building the economy to make it a new home for all of the Syracusans still left on the planet below.

It also served as an emergency fallback position for forces operating beyond the Great Wall, with an enormous cavern two kilometres across and two hundred metres high excavated to allow an entire army the room to make a quick stop over. Normally the colossal chamber was kept empty and clean, but just a few minutes ago a great black orb had materialized out of the Warp and then unfolded to release a gore drenched army, a mighty, blood red Evangelion at its centre.

Marching through the somewhat confused troops, Rong-Arya barely spared a glance at a medical team carrying a young red-headed girl away on a stretcher before she came to the gigantic figure of Primarch Toji and saluted.

“Primarch! You honour us with your presence, although I suppose that this means that not all has gone well?” Rong-Arya said.

Shaking his head, Toji grumbled and returned the salute, “No, the enemy gained orbital superiority and we were forced to retreat. They thought to pin us on the ground by sacrificing their own troops, but unfortunately they were not made of stern enough stuff to delay our escape. What is the situation here, captain?”

“Unchanged from my last report. The shakedown of the Stiletto has gone well and we are ready for our next mission at any time, although we must admit that we would prefer to be relieved rather than abandon this outpost. The locals are no match for us, but we have made sure that we have always engaged in asymmetric fights assuming we were on the same technological level as the locals,” Rong-Arya said, dropping the daemonic voice now that formal introductions were done with.

Nodding, Toji said, “We shall not trouble you long. We merely need to rest and clean up from the fight and the journey before we head back home. That should take no longer than a few hours.”

“Nonsense good Primarch! Stay with us at least a day or two to rest. While I am sure that your marines are in fighting shape, I can see that you have civilians amongst your number who could use the extra downtime, and I am sure your men would appreciate the time just as much,” Rong-Arya insisted.

“Well… yeah, it would be a good idea to wait a little bit longer if you have the resources to handle the strain. Now that I look over my forces, I can see that Operation Leliel was harder on them than I anticipated. In fact… damn it! I thought I ordered that thing shut off before something like Operation Leliel,” Toji said, staring at the crew of his World Raider.

Looking over the fried anti-grav pods, they shrugged helplessly and said, “Apologies sir. The drive was off but it must have still been too hot and cracked under the strain of the transport.”

Burying his face in a gauntleted hand, Toji said, “Kensuke is going to be right ticked off over this one.”

Glancing over the tank, Rong-Arya said, “Nice. New model?”

Nodding, Toji said, “Yeah, it’s the new anti-armour model. It can’t carry Terminators because of all the space devoted to increased armour and generators, but with sponson mounted twin-linked bright lances, hull mounted twin-linked assault cannons, and a pintle mounted multi-melta means that one of these babies can rip apart pretty much any another tank we would ever come across. Throw in a squad of Marines kitted out for anti-tank work and the fact that the hover system lets you hot drop this baby behind enemy lines and one of these things can rip apart just a squadron of lesser vehicles single handed. Kensuke really went all out with this one.”

Sighing, Rong-Arya said, “Too bad that this monster, like the Stiletto, reveals our weaknesses.”

Having been floating bored above the two adults; Ali hovered in closer and asked, “What weaknesses? It’s a Land Raider with the tracks replaced with Eldar anti-grav technology and weapons. It’s faster, tougher, and hits harder than any weapons platform of its size from that the Old Gods would have had access to.”

“Yes Little Ali and they’re even thinking of trying to squeeze void shields and holo-projectors into the next production run… but I know what the captain is getting at and I agree with them. Kensuke understands it too, which is why he’s designing the damn things in the first place. Simply put, we’re too damn weak to afford anything less,” Toji said with a sigh.

“That doesn’t make sense. If we were weak we wouldn’t be able to afford so much lavish technology,” Ali pointed out.

“The Stiletto and the various makes of the World Raider tanks represent an enormous investiture of resources, in fact, too much investiture if we were a larger empire. For the price of one World Raider we could get twenty or thirty lesser tanks, which would be able to perform their job much more effectively as a group than a single super tank as they can cover much more ground. The problem is that our population is so small we can’t afford the crews for twenty or thirty lesser tanks, so we have no choice but to invest all of our eggs in one basket if we want to have a hope of winning an engagement. The Marines are the same. The assault troops for the Reavers of Asukhon have jump packs and jump belts and Warp Spider teleporters, and the only reason that we don’t all have power weapons is because chainswords and axes are already overkill most of the time. Simply put, we have a shiny military with all sorts of toys but that’s because it’s tiny enough that we can afford to get away with everyone getting the premium polish,” Toji explained.

Blanching, Ali asked, “So what happens once we start expanding?”

“We’re already looking at less expensive and more logistically sound technologies, but for now all the shiny stuff is also serving as test beds for later on. For example, if we can solve the ammo and parts problem, my back-up sidearm will probably become the standard for officers in the next century,” Rong-Arya said, patting one of the pistols at their side.

“Oh, is that a Mk. II Hellstorm fusion pistol?” Toji asked, taking a critical eye to the weapon.

“Mk. III actually, I got it just before the Stiletto left dry dock. Slightly less powerful but with more shots,” Rong-Arya said.

“Nice. I know that Toji had a Mk. VI when we left just because he wanted the latest model off the assembly lines. I love the guy like a brother, but he’s really obsessed with getting the newest stuff. I have no idea how his wife deals with it,” Toji muttered.

“How does your wife deal with you hanging out all night to play plasma ball?” One of the Sons of Toji asked sarcastically while hauling some gear away.

“That’s training!” Toji cried out in an annoyed tone while his men laughed. Obviously it was an old joke between them all.

“Toji?” Ali asked softly.

“Yes Ali?” Toji responded.

“How weak are we?” Ali inquired.

Frowning, Toji said, “That depends on your definition of ‘weak’. If you mean in absolute terms, then the guys from this universe could destroy our major population and production centres on Earth if they threw a big enough fleet there, as we simply don’t have the coverage to repel an attack of sufficient numbers. That said we’ve made sure to be very careful to cover our tracks and only engage in powers that can’t fight back, so we're in no danger, thus from a certain point of view we are very strong. If the… Federation?” Toji paused, looking for Rong-Arya for confirmation, who nodded. “If the Federation were able to track us back to our Earth, it would be useless as we intentionally picked this place because it’s in a balance of power situation with several other neighbours. They would have to strip most of their fleet assets to ensure enough of their ships slipped through our defences to begin bombardment of our cities, and their neighbours would most likely swoop in an take them apart if they tried, something they know would happen. Incidentally, you did leave a couple of powers alone, right?”

Nodding, Rong-Arya said, “We left the Romulan Star Empire and several of the lesser powers alone, and the Dominion are sufficiently aggressive that they would never ally with the Federation against us, although the reverse might be true.”

“Good. How did the briefing go again? Oh yeah, the only guys you weren’t supposed to antagonize were the Borg as our scouting indicated they were nuts enough and had enough resources to try and take us on single handed,” Toji noted.

Rong-Arya blinked and said, “You know, it’s been a year since I sent the report, but does blowing up a lone cube far away from its home system in self defence count as ‘antagonizing’ the Borg?”

The warning sirens chose that time to go off.

“Fuck,” Rong-Arya noted unhappily.

[Robo Jesus]

Ok. The statue Picard found earlier seems to be that of Hikari. Considering that Picard was 'trapped', I assume things went bad on a massive scale. With the Evangelion there, it would leave them with a way to evacuate a massive number of civilians and personnel out of the underground structures quickly. The Planet and its moon must have fallen.

Wow, given how Overkill is a way of life for Chaos, for the Borg to take down that world, even as under-equiped and under-defended as it was, says that the Borg must have brought thousands of cubes and insane amounts of equipment with them. That... must have been one hell of a battle.

[holyknight]

Ok. The statue Picard found earlier seems to be that of Hikari. Considering that Picard was 'trapped', I assume things went bad on a massive scale. With the Evangelion there, it would leave them with a way to evacuate a massive number of civilians and personnel out of the underground structures quickly. The Planet and its moon must have fallen.

Wow, given how Overkill is a way of life for Chaos, for the Borg to take down that world, even as under-equiped and under-defended as it was, says that the Borg must have brought thousands of cubes and insane amounts of equipment with them. That... must have been one hell of a battle.

Methinks that the Moon only must have fallen, and that Chaos did win the battle, likely after something that re-defined the concept of OVERKILL

Hmm....maybe a stunt that generated something like the equivalent of WH40K's Maelstrom, a sort of chibi-Eye of Terror...the warp bleeding into Real Space? With the Stiletto ending on the other side of the Galaxy as a effect of the real massive Warp Storm emergence?

Klingons under Chaos? While oddly they are spiritually more resistant on a basis to this group of Warp Gods, they are SOOO Anger-Prone, bloodlusting and combat-addicted, that i can see Asukhon taking a vested interest into "seduce" them, to create the first Cultists to send into the Klingon Empire.

Anyone can imagine Chaos-turned Klingon Warbands roaming through the Alpha quadrant??

[Deadpan29]

Chapter Twenty-seven: New Syracuse
I actually disobeyed orders to come here because there are elements in Starfleet who would prefer you dealt with at any cost due to the… destabilizing nature you have been having on our politics

I'd be very interested in hearing more about this political/social shake-up, presumably caused by exposure to chaos ideas and ideals.

“Nice. I know that Toji had a Mk. VI when we left just because he wanted the latest model off the assembly lines. I love the guy like a brother, but he’s really obsessed with getting the newest stuff. I have no idea how his wife deals with it,” Toji muttered.

I think you meant Kensuke had a Mk. VI there.

[Robo Jesus]

Klingons under Chaos? While oddly they are spiritually more resistant on a basis to this group of Warp Gods, they are SOOO Anger-Prone, bloodlusting and combat-addicted, that i can see Asukhon taking a vested interest into "seduce" them, to create the first Cultists to send into the Klingon Empire.

Klingons do not worship gods. They kill them.
[/Worf]

I think you meant Kensuke had a Mk. VI there.

Looking back over that, there is another post where he needs to switch out Kensuke and Toji or alter the chapter itself to make more sense. Chapter Twentyfour where he wrote "Kensuke in the Defence of Bloodhaven", as Kensuke was never shown to be there.

[Academia Nut]

Chapter Twenty-eight: Damocles

While jogging to the nearest launch pad, Rong-Arya pulled out a communications device similar in appearance to a military radio but working on completely different principles and demanded, “Stiletto, status report!”

“Multiple Borg cubes have just begun appearing on the far side of Syracuse. Current count is at thirty cubes and rising at a rate of approximately one every two seconds,” O’Hare replied crisply.

“Son of a bitch,” Rong-Arya muttered while pulling out the data pad Picard had given them. They thought that they had set up a proper bottleneck in the nebula but the only way to get ships in like that was with some form of FTL that bypassed the disruptive effects of local conditions. “Can you make a straight line vector, or at least a near straight line, between their current location and the following coordinates?”

After a few moments O’Hare replied, “Affirmative ma’am.”

Running through two life times of tactical and strategic training and one of actual experience, along with a survey of the coming timelines, Rong-Arya figured that the Borg had placed their LZ behind the planet to prevent the Stiletto from simply shooting them as they exited.

“Alright, hold station over New Syracuse. All weapons are to go free, all defensive measures activated. All rules of engagement are suspended. Shoot to kill, shoot at full charge with all available weapons, and do not stop shooting until all of those bastards are scrap, you here me? No artistry, just kill them: quick, clean, and efficiently,” Rong-Arya ordered.

“And you captain?” O’Hare asked.

“I will attempt to make my way to the ship, but we cannot afford to delay the battle once the Borg decide for it to be joined. You are all well trained and you can function without me. Perhaps not as well, but a single person, no matter how skilled, cannot become the lynchpin of battle,” Rong-Arya replied.

There was a pause and then several voices, the entire bridge crew all announced, “Yes ma’am! For the glory of Chaos!”

Code: Select all

Tactical Cube Designation 1 of 60 beginning combat mission against species designation 9251

Primary objective: Species 9251 ship designation Stiletto

Secondary objective: All other species 9251 assets

Tertiary objective: Gather data on Species 9251 for further analysis

Primary objective threat analysis: Species 9251 ship designation Stiletto

-Power generation: Unknown
-Defensive measures: Unknown material used for armour, scans inconclusive.  Unknown method of energy shield detected, energy handling capacity presumed high.  Defensive holographic screens detected, reducing accuracy by 15.2009%
-Offensive measures: Unknown.  Prior engagement burned out sensors upon activation of primary weapon system.  Assume extreme
-Acceleration profile: Unknown.

Overall threat rating: EXTREME

Beginning engagement

…

Cubes designated 12 of 60 and 38 of 60 destroyed by primary weapon of Species 9251 Stiletto

Tactical consideration: Avoid aligning cubes such that a shot from the primary weapon of Species 9251 Stiletto cannot strike more than one cube simultaneously

Cubes designated 7 of 60, 19 of 60, 58 of 60, and 59 of 60 destroyed by primary weapon of Species 9251 Stiletto

Updating data on Species 9251 Stiletto: Nonlinear acceleration demonstrated capacity to exceed 1000G

Tactical consideration: Recharge time and acceleration exceeds capacity of cubes to comply with prior tactical consideration

Tactical analysis of the destruction of cubs 7 of 60, 19 of 60, 38 of 60, 58 of 60, and 59 of 60

-Shield analysis: Primary weapon of Species 9251 Stiletto is a high frequency coherent electromagnetic beam.  Proper shield modulation will allow all energy to be devoted to energy cancellation
-Energy handling: Energy output of primary weapon for Species 9251 Stiletto exceeds total reactor output of four tactical cubes by an unknown number of orders of magnitude.
-Structural analysis: Photon momentum imparted by primary weapon of Species 9251 Stiletto exceeds structural integrity fields and materials capacity by an unknown number of orders of magnitude

Adaptation consideration: Shield modulation possible but of negligible use.  Construction of new cubes required.  Addition of sufficient armour, inertial dampers, reactors, and shields not possible with current technology.  Increase reactor and attendant technologies output by a minimum of five orders of magnitude.  Increase materials technology and attendant technologies by a minimum of five orders of magnitude.

Species list known to have such technologies:
-List contains 1 entry
-Species 9251

Assimilation priority of Species 9251 recommended increase

Tactical consideration: bring additional forces

Cubes 2 of 60, 3 of 60, 4 of 60, 6 of 60, 11 of 60, 17 of 60, 20 of 60, 23 of 60, 31 of 60, 33 of 60, 47 of 60, and 52 of 60 all destroyed by secondary weapons fire from Species 9251 Stiletto.

Tactical consideration: Maintain minimum safe distance of 20 km between cubes in all directions

Tactical analysis of destruction of cubes 2 of 60, 3 of 60, 4 of 60, 6 of 60, 11 of 60, 17 of 60, 20 of 60, 23 of 60, 31 of 60, 33 of 60, 47 of 60, and 52 of 60 by secondary weapons fire from Species 9251 Stiletto

-Cubes 4 of 60, 23 of 60, and 52 of 60 destroyed by secondary weapon causing critical structural damage while passing through superstructure at high relativistic speeds
-Cubes 2 of 60, 3 of 60, 6 of 60, 11 of 60, 17 of 60, 20 of 60, 31 of 60, 33 of 60, and 47 of 60 destroyed by high energy plasma warhead detonation

Adaptation consideration: None known against high acceleration relativistic kill vehicles at short ranges.  Destruction of launcher only known effective countermeasure.  Construction of new cubes with improved materials and/or energy generation and shield technology possible adaptation method against detonation of warhead.

Species list known to have such technologies:
-List contains 1 entry
-Species 9251

Assimilation priority of Species 9251 recommended increase

Tactical consideration: bring additional forces

Tactical consideration: 28.3333% of initial forces destroyed

Tactical consideration: Mission clock reads 0 days 0 hours 0 minutes 8 seconds 57 milliseconds

Tactical consideration: Tertiary and quaternary weapons of Species 9251 Stiletto have yet to fire.  Probable reason: insufficient time to acquire targets not destroyed by primary and secondary weapons as multiple weapons locks already detected

Tactical consideration: Probable tertiary weapons mounts exceed number of remaining cubes

Tactical analysis: 98.4713% chance of complete destruction of remaining cubes within the next 40 seconds

Tactical consideration: Temporary disengagement from combat operations recommended.  Methods of disengagement before destruction: None

Mission analysis: Mission has 0.0000% probability of completing primary objective.  Mission has 0.0001% probability of completing secondary objective.  Tertiary objective unsatisfactorily fulfilled.

Mission update: Primary objective changed

Primary objective: Observe effects of Collective weapons on Species 9251 Stiletto

Tactical consideration: Species 9251 primary and secondary weapons ranges unknown but exceed Collective ranges by a minimum of an order of magnitude.  Probable ranges of tertiary weapons also exceed Collective ranges

Mission analysis: 3.8014% chance of completing primary objective

[Unknown] consideration: Ha!  Ha!  Our psychics hacked your Collective, eat shit and die motherfuckers!

“Well… that’s sixty down. Let’s see what the next wave has in store,” Rong-Arya commented as they sat down in the captain’s chair, having only recently managed to get a shuttle up to the Stiletto once the shooting died down.

“Are we just going to sit here and let them throw shit at us?” Ichiro-Faust asked.

“Negative. As much as these bastards are self-contained a cube on a combat mission has to chew threw fuel and ammo at a high rate, and they only have an outpost in this part of the galaxy. There are a limited number of cubes in this quadrant that their logistics should be able to reliably support, so we will wait half a day for the next wave before we attempt to move on their outpost. If it was just us fighting I would go on the offence right away, but…” Rong-Arya trailed off at the last bit, the implications clear. “Right. Plans for evacuation are already underway. Once the civilians and the Primarch are secure we can go kick those Borg fucktards in the balls.”

“Ma’am, we are detecting new contacts on the opposite side of Syracuse,” Xavier reported.

“Hmmm… let’s see what they learned from that spanking,” Rong-Arya muttered while leaning forward almost eagerly.

Over the next few minutes two hundred Borg cubes of several different makes and models appeared, arranging themselves into two groups of a hundred each, arranged into hemispheres with each individual cube positioned so that the Stiletto could not hit multiple cubes with the Pulsar Lance or its torpedoes. Once both hemispheres were formed up, one began to go spin-wise around the planet while the other went anti-spin-wise two minutes later. More cubes were arriving and forming up into a third formation.

“Clever… clever. Still rather simplistic and brute force, but they are clearly trying to minimize damage the speed at which we can blow them to the Warp so that they can get in close to brawl with us, and possibly attack New Syracuse while we are engaged with them. This will require… finesse on our part,” Rong-Arya noted, looking over the approaching formations.

“Commander, we still have the Bearers on board, correct?” They finally asked.

“Affirmative ma’am,” Ichiro-Faust answered.

“Designate a cube, I don’t care which, and cripple it. But do not destroy it. Make sure all of the gunners have it designated as a friend until I say otherwise. Once its shields have been knocked down, teleport the Bearers on to it. Make sure that they are carrying the Infinite Despair Plague, with the objective of getting into as many communications nodes as possible. The only way to keep up this sort of brutal meat grinder tactic is if your troops either are more afraid of going back than forward or if they have no fear. I want to make sure neither is a factor,” Rong-Arya said with a predatory grin.

“The Bearers will be overjoyed,” Ichiro-Faust replied with an equal grin.


Sergeant Gregor Stamatelos was overjoyed. The last time they had fought the Borg they had slaughtered the slow moving cyborgs by the hundreds before growing bored, but this time they were authorized to carry one of Mama Reigle’s greatest blessings: the Infinite Despair Plague. Created as an anti-boarding measure, it was capable of corrupting metals as well as flesh, and as an added bonus it could force grow circuitry capable of causing fear and pain in anything more advanced than a calculator.

The idea was that if your boarding vessel sudden was terrified of the ship it was trying to board it would make the operation considerably more difficult.

Locking his helmet on his a wet crunch of rusting mechanisms lubricated by bursting, necrotic boils, Gregor lead his men to the teleport pad where fellow servants of Reigle were standing by with hoses to douse them with fluids tapped directly from the organic parts of the ship so that they would be inoculated with the deadly plague. The only down side of this operation was that they would have to give up the disease as it was too dangerous to keep.

And that meant- horror of horrors- decontamination!

As he was being sprayed down with the thick brown slurry, Gregor said over the radio to his men, “Alright boys, once we get aboard we are to split into two teams of five and hit as many communications nodes as you can, spreading the blessings of Mama Reigle as far and wide as possible. Let us teach these Borg to embrace pain and despair as thoroughly as we have.”

With a flash of light and the bang of air rushing in to fill the void where they had once stood, the Terminators from the Bearers of Reigle disappeared from the Stiletto and reappeared on the cube that had just recently had its shields knocked off-line by a single hit from a bombardment cannon.

“Swarms active boys!” Gregor cried out wetly while giving the psychic cue to the living hives of flying insects within his body. He gave his flesh to them willingly so that they would have a home and food, and in turn they would attack his enemies. All of his men were the same.

It took three Borg drones collapsing screaming to the ground for the Collective to notice that the Bearers were even on the cube and thus take action. By that time the walls of the cube were already starting to corrode under the influence of the deadly plague carried by the Bearers and the swarms of buzzing insects surrounding them like black clouds. Force fields snapped up to contain the Terminators, but the ones that did not fail due to sudden and rapid decay were downed with the simple method of a power fist to the projector.

As the two groups of Terminators made their slow march through the cube, the Collective watched on in horror as more and more drones collapsed, tearing at their own implants, wailing in agony. At first they tried to gather more data, but when they detected the presence of microscopic fusion reactions they realized that they were dealing with something willing to fire plasma guns at their nano-probes and that they could not devise a defence against that sort of thing. So they just shut off the infected drones before their screaming could disrupt the purity of the Collective.

Then the plague began rewiring their transmitters. The Infinite Despair Plague was creating a new Collective, one where all of the processing power was dedicated to transmitting the dying, agonized screams of thousands of drones into the Collective at large.

Coordination in the cube dropped considerably.

The Sergeant Gregor found a communications node; one used for broadcast, and plunged his Viral Cleaver into the mechanism. Instead of being destroyed, the node was instantly infected, and Gregor broadcast to the Collective, all of it, “Resistance is futile. You will be infected,” before he was shut out.

The Collective was composed of countless trillions of minds spread across the galaxy, but hundreds of billions of them were unwillingly assimilated. The screams of the dying and the declaration of intent in the Alpha Quadrant forced into their minds temporarily awoke the terror of forced assimilation. So many billions of voices joined their fears to others, creating a chain reaction of panic and terror. For exactly twelve seconds before the cold, machine parts of the Collective could clamp down, a single emotion raged across the length and breadth of the galaxy.

Fear.


Ironically, what happened next would not have occurred if not for Rong-Arya’s decision to terrify the Borg. One of the cubes, gripped in panic, began shooting wildly. A single, solitary torpedo went far, far off course, if it could be said to have ever had a course to begin with.

By Chaos standards, it was a pathetic bomb, two hundred megatons of explosive energy from a matter/antimatter explosion. Just enough to possibly cause minor damage if it could penetrate the shields of the Stiletto and it hit a sensitive location.

It wasn’t aimed at the Stiletto.

The weapon crashed into the primary hydroponics facility on New Syracuse before detonating. Most of the blast was directed outward, and with no atmosphere on the moon to contain it, a little more than half the energy radiated harmlessly into space.

Rock, organic matter, glass, plastics, metals, they all flashed to monatomic vapour in milliseconds after initiation under intense gamma ray bombardment. Again, most of the energy was lost as instead of this vapour compressing against an atmosphere much of it was blown off into space. But in the connecting tunnels beneath the facility, there was enough confinement that pressure could build in the instant before the rocks they were carved from turned molten from the incredible heat.

The entire hydroponics facility, the size of a small city, was destroyed in an instant, but nearly twenty kilometres away was where the significant damage was done. One of the hab domes exploded as a ball of superheated gas to point where it became plasma erupted out of the connecting tunnels. Thousands died, cooked by the fury of the fireball in an instant or suffocated when they found their air either lacking in oxygen or simply evacuated out the hole in the ceiling.

In orbit, the bridge crew of the Stiletto blinked in surprise. So far the Borg had been ignoring the settlement.

Then Rong-Arya’s perfect memory kicked in. They had helped plan the construction of New Syracuse. The primary habitation area and the arrival area for the Primarch hadn’t been touched but they knew what had been in that hab dome.

“THAT WAS THE PRIMARY NURSERY DOME!” They screamed out in horror. Tens of thousands of children and youths of half a dozen species had been in there along with their care givers.

“New plan boys. We finish these guys up, we smash their outpost in this quadrant, and then we track them back to their homes and we make the Borg extinct,” Rong-Arya declared, ripping apart the armrests of their chair in fury while a selfish part of them was glad that Cassandra, the babe they had adopted from the installation that had grown into New Syracuse, had been kept aboard the Stiletto.

The Borg would pay for this.

---

If anyone know how to get a change in font without using the code tag that would be appreciated. Also, you now know why the children's hospital on Earth had so many patients.

[White Haven]

And so many Marines on guard.

[holyknight]

One Thing its Chaos.

Another, Tzintchi, Asukhon, Reigle and Mislaato, hearing of the events of New Syracuse, and erupting on a explosion of rage that will make the Warp itself so turbulent that a hurricane would seem as peaceful.

Actually, if the Stiletto were to find the Borg Queen, or one of the Main nodes of the Collective. they could manipulate the Borg race, into a all-massive emotional frenzy...Hack the Borg, make them come in mass into their primary star systems, then make them go into maddening frenzies of warp-induced fear, rage, lust, despair, love and all those wonderful emotions that fuel the warp itself, but without chance of stopping this time. The Result?.

The first artificially made Eye of Terror on the ST-Verse.

Of course, the price would be the entire Borg race dying and feeding the Warp Gods, but you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, no?

[Academia Nut]

Well, it took a little bit, but here is the next chapter, full of Chaos and madness and Borg dying by the cube-full. This incidentally is the last ST chapter for quite a while.

Chapter Twenty-nine: Briar Patch

“Communications uplink from Earth ma’am, Priority One,” a disembodied voice declared to the bridge crew of the Stiletto a few minutes after the last Borg cube was scrap in space. The battle had been… rather underwhelming really. For hours the Borg had come like lambs to the slaughter, utterly unable to damage the Stiletto while their own coordination was still disrupted from the earlier attack on the Collective. It had all of the nervous energy of battle with none of the risk, leaving the crew on edge and drained.

“Let me hear it then Lars,” Rong-Arya demanded dismissively.

“Message requests that you take it privately,” Lars informed her with a touch of nervousness.

Rong-Arya raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Requesting’ in this context meant that someone really high up the chain of command was about to chew them out. Damn it! The New Syracuse Disaster had been an accident!

Getting up, Rong-Arya went over to the private communication chamber, opening lock with a particular psychic key before entering and securing the thick armoured door behind them. They then said, “Okay, Lars, let me hear it now.”

In the center of the large chamber a massive psycho-holographic image appeared and said, “Oh, but it will be so much to speak face to face.”

Rong-Arya’s jaw dropped before they hit the ground and said, “Lord Tzintchi! What have we done to receive this honour?”

“Oh don’t grovel, if there’s one thing I can’t stand its people grovelling,” Tzintchi said dismissively.

“Uh… I thought you loved grovelling?” Rong-Arya asked.

“Actually I do, it’s a massive stroke to the ego. But I enjoy screwing with people’s minds more and quoting from a movie nearly seventy years old really screws with people,” Tzintchi said with a shrug.

“You are… as unpredictable as ever Lord Tzintchi,” Rong-Arya admitted.

“Damn straight, and don’t you forget it,” Tzintchi replied. “Anyway, on to the reason I called. I am giving you a direct order here. Do not engage the Borg outside the Alpha quadrant.”

“What?” Rong-Arya asked in shock.

“You heard me. Stay the fuck away from their home territory. We’ve done an analysis and the Stiletto does not have the firepower to do sufficient damage to their primary defensive installations. So you are ordered to not risk your ship or your crew trying to pull an Ahab. Take out their base in the Alpha Quadrant and then return home. New Syracuse is to be completely evacuated by Toji and his forces,” Tzintchi ordered.

“We… Lord… we can’t let this go!” Rong-Arya cried out in outrage.

“Rong-Arya, what do you call proclaiming a crusade to kill trillions of beings and drive a species to extinction, toppling one of the most powerful groups in a galaxy all over the deaths of a few thousand people?” Tzintchi asked.

“Official government policy?” Rong-Arya suggested.

“Yes! But you also have to be successful at exterminating your enemies the first time or they tend to come back to bite you in the ass. And, if necessary, you almost might need to bide your time and wait for the right moment to do that. Which is why with the destruction of their base, the Stiletto’s first tour will officially come to an end. That said, we’ll remember this,” Tzintchi said, and then the holograph shifted to a slowly rotating image of a new ship.

“You like?” Tzintchi’s disembodied voice said. “It’s the early design model for our first battleship. A bit overambitious, yes, but we figure we can start construction within the next fifty to a hundred years once we have the construction yards built and the experience of building cruisers. It’s obviously an early draft of the design, but honestly, our designers are bored. With all the information we’ve passed down to them, for the most part they can only twiddle their thumbs and come up with crazy ideas until we can actually build and test their designs. Thus on paper, we already have over twenty different classes of ships.”

“And you’re showing us this because…?” Rong-Arya asked tentatively.

His face returning and replacing the ship, Tzintchi said, “Because the New Syracuse class battleships will have the first mission to exterminate the Borg from the multiverse. Don’t fuck up and you’re guaranteed the captain’s chair for that mission. Really impress us over the next few decades and that will be the flagship for the fleet deployed to the task.”

There was a pause before Rong-Arya said, “So when do you want the keys back by?”

“Well, you need to have the girl home by ten, so I’ll want the keys in my hands no later than eleven, you got that? And make sure you fill up the tank before you bring it into the garage,” Tzintchi said with faux seriousness.

“Got it. Thank you Lord Tzintchi, we won’t fail you,” Rong-Arya said.

“I know you won’t,” Tzintchi replied before the transmission cut out.


In the Palace back on Earth, Tzintchi moved a few pieces about. Things were about to get interesting. With the aftermath of the first stage of his overall scheme still having yet to cool, there was still much to do for the next stage. He had some info now on the outside multiverse. Now he needed more on the structure of the barrier they were trapped in. They could see much, but it seemed that the designers of this trap had made sure that it was impossible to go anywhere you wanted.

For example, their agent Ethan Rayne could not be contacted if a psychic signal was sent from Haruhi’s universe, but it could be sent directly, something that indicated that any of the hubs they had discovered so far were incapable of direct contact with each other. Quite interesting really.

Then there were the Doldrums, sections of entire universes where the energy content was much lower, and the physics much less compliant to things like psychics or faster than light travel. As far as early scouting could tell, you had to go directly from one universe to the next in the Doldrums instead of using a hub, but as one moved away from the ‘centre-line’ travel became harder.

So far any long range expeditions had remained theoretical, centuries off at best, but Tzintchi could feel the tides of fate tugging at him. There was something out there that demanded a thread be pulled to unravel something. But he couldn’t exactly say what was happening.

So he was going to throw the Stiletto into the heart of things and see what happened. It should have the supplies to make it home through the Doldrums.

Should.


In the past two months the Briar Patch had been transformed radically by the appearance of the Borg. Originally a number of scout ships had arrived with the equipment to construct a transwarp gate, and within a month they established a forward base hiding in the unstable nebula, the greatest concentration of Borg military might in well… ever. Not since the war with Species 8472 had the Borg met such a threat, and unlike the biotech of Species 8472 there was as of yet no reason why assimilation should be impossible. The Borg just needed to use the right methods.

Also, as an unexpected bonus they had discovered a planet inhabited by primitives that had some unusual radiation about it that locals had been studying. They actually had a collector mostly finished but seemed unready to use it.

After capturing the installation the Borg, seeing the metaphasic particles about the planet as more valuable than the effort make the small population on the surface into drones, had completed the array and turned the world into a lifeless rock. Thus ended the Baku.

Even better, the Borg had assimilated one of the warships in orbit after it had destroyed one of the scout ships with a peculiar weapon. While subspace weapons were not exactly something new to the Borg, very few races pursued research into them very far as the weapons were far too unstable, these were something they had never seen before and thus had happily assimilated the ship.

Now, in the wake of the disastrous assault on the Damocles Nebula, the Borg were scrambling to adapt. The initial target had proved not just worth the effort, but the fact that it had repulsed hundreds of Borg ships had forced a re-evaluation of current tactics. They were at least fairly certain they had solved the problem as to how Species 9251 had hacked the Collective.

Unfortunately they had not quite figured out the problem of how to deal with a multi-gigaton spewing death machine with an unknown FTL system suddenly appearing on the edge of their base and accelerating towards high c velocities while firing all guns.


“You know what? I love high c combat. It’s the colours really,” Rong-Arya stated in a bored tone as the explosions began. “On approach, all the pyrotechnics get blue shifted, so you get to see all of the infrared that we miss most of the time, and there really is a lot of it. Then, while moving away everything is red shifted and we get to see the interesting ultraviolet tones that add so much. Add in length contraction and all of that fascinating relativistic stuff and it’s really quite pretty to see a twenty-seven cubic kilometre cube take a hundred gigaton bombardment cannon shot to the centre of mass.”

“The battle is going according to plan ma’am. Borg forces are currently at 75% initial strength and dropping rapidly,” Ichiro-Faust noted.

“Excellent, excellent. Continue the attack like this. Nothing new from them?” Rong-Arya asked.

“No new tactics or technologies being displayed. Sensors do show that there is a ship near the centre of the formation that is not of standard Borg configuration, but it is communicating with them. It’s probably a captured local vessel, so no threat,” Ichiro-Faust noted.

“If the Borg captured it then it must have some interest to them. Get a firing solution to the gunners for the next time we make a pass on their position. We don’t want to take any chances,” Rong-Arya ordered.

“Affirmative ma’am, it’s… it’s fired something into our current path,” Ichiro-Faust reported with some confusion.

“Switch from our current path to a linear one Lieutenant Striker, keep us out of the path of whatever that was,” Rong-Arya demanded.

“Aye-aye ma’am,” Striker replied, taking the ship out of its long, slowly spiralling inwards side-slip that allowed the front and port guns to be fired at the Borg and throttled the engines up 80%, breaking them off from the Borg until they could evaluate this new threat.

Half a light second from their previous location something very strange happened.

Rong-Arya blinked and asked, “Lieutenant Xavier, what in the Warp is that?”

After several seconds, Xavier said grimly, “It’s a Warp space rift.”

“Damn it! We didn’t know that they could do that!” Rong-Arya cried out.

“Captain… it’s accelerating towards us,” Xavier reported a second later.

Rong-Arya blinked their burning eyes once before they asked, “What do you mean by that Lieutenant?”

“I mean that it is rapidly moving towards us, its velocity increasing with each second,” Xavier clarified in a somewhat stressed tone.

“Captain, I think I know what’s happening. Weapons crews are reporting an increase in the stress levels on the S2 and S3 engines. They’re essentially Warp taps so with a tear like that out there, it could be drawn to the nearest point of similar energy,” Ichiro-Faust suggested.

“Cut all power to the holofields and divert the energy to the void shields,” Rong-Arya snapped, and the crew quickly relayed the orders. “Also, I want torpedoes launched at their transwarp gate; we should at least make sure that bastard gets take out before we leave.”

The Stiletto ploughed through pillowing clouds of unstable metreon gas, the strange substance lighting up off their void shields, creating a strange counter point to the eerie light of the tear that followed doggedly at their heels, and it dropped a pair of torpedoes in its wake. Their engines lighting up and pushing them through the nebula, they cut trails of fire straight to the heart of the Borg position, crashing into the ring in space they had constructed to serve as their way in and out of the Alpha Quadrant. The torpedoes actually had a much lower yield than the main guns, but they were designed to slip past void shields and punch through armour to detonate inside a ship, a design that mostly made up for their lack of overall firepower but was rather useless against enemies that did not use void shields.

“Damn… okay, so the explosion shut down the gate, but there’s still a lot of debris that could be reactivated,” Xavier reported.

“Hit it with another pair then,” Rong-Arya retorted.

“The rift is getting awfully close ma’am,” Xavier pointed out.

“Fire when ready then. The gods have some plan for this region and the Borg do not factor into them. Plus if we can’t wipe out their species right now, we might as well settle for ruining their plans,” Rong-Arya said.

“Port tube is ready, starboard will be ready in ten seconds,” Ichiro-Faust replied.

“Fire,” Rong-Arya ordered.

What happened next was something that no one in Chaos particularly liked to talk about. As befitting their nature, random, unlikely things tended to happen around them. Unfortunately, while they liked to use this to screw with people, it also meant that Murphy and his friend Finagle liked to take a wrench to them with equal frequency.

The tear struck the back of their void shields. A sheet of lightning rippled across the surface of the shield. It could have gone anywhere. It chose to go up the port side of the ship. It could have happened at any time. It chose to happen just in time for the torpedo just launched to reach the void shield and get a massive amount of energy grounded into it.

The warhead was normally well designed and would have simply gone inert, but the crews had been ordered to tamper with the fuses so that the torpedoes would not slow down before detonating as if they were facing void shields, meaning that it was live the moment it left the tubes.

A small star was birthed next to the Stiletto right as the tear in reality caught up to them. The port torpedo tube was smashed, and dozens of weapons emplacements were stripped away in the explosion. The starboard torpedo was knocked off its track just as it was launching and its motor fused the weapon into place before it realized it was stuck in the tube and shut off.

“Status report!” Rong-Arya demanded.

“Severe damage to the port side, damage reports still in coming but several weapons mounts are inoperative. Void shields are down. Starboard torpedo tube is inoperable. The rift appears to have been sealed by energy from the explosion,” Ichiro-Faust reported quickly before adding on, “Oh and the Borg appear to have noticed that we have no shields and are incoming.”

“Fuck. All hands, prepare to repel boarders. I want shields up as quickly as possible and a firing solution on that fucking ship. I want it dead,” Rong-Arya snapped.

As the bridge crew began to go about their tasks, a strange humming noise alerted them to trouble. Even before the Borg boarding parties had finished materializing though Rong-Arya was already out of her command throne, daemon sword drawn while security crews were readying their own weapons.

The first three Borg on the bridge did exactly nothing before being cut down, but as was typical Borg response they simply sent more drones. As was the response of a well trained bridge crew, no one being directly attacked did anything but their jobs. Striker brought the ship around so that the starboard side and its fully functional weapons were presented to the incoming Borg ships. O’Hare coordinated inter-ship communications to make sure that damage control and the anti-boarding parties did not interfere with each other. Xavier made sure that the still functioning sensors were giving adequate data to the gunnery crews. Ichiro-Faust prioritized targets while also occasionally ripping the head off a drone that got too close.

After decapitating one drone and setting another on fire with their minds, Rong-Arya said, “How goes getting the void shields online Mr. Ichiro-Faust?”

“It goes, oh captain my captain, but these blackguards help not the matter,” Ichiro-Faust replied.

Blowing away a drone with their fusion pistol, conveniently decorated to look like a 17th Century naval pistol, Rong-Arya said, “Oh aye. Do we have the range of that cutter that crippled us so? We do so wish to see her captain swinging from the yard arm.”

Ripping the heart out of a stunned drone, Ichiro-Faust replied, “Alas, these scallywags seem to have realized the only way to bring down our shields is with whatever they have stashed away in that boat, so they have formed up a defensive wall of cubes. If we had torpedoes…”

“What was that last part Mr. Ichiro-Faust?” Rong-Arya asked with a grin on their face while running a drone through, causing its life to fade as its soul was ripped out.

“Torpedoes ma’am,” Ichiro-Faust replied, a grin growing as they realized where this was going.

“Damn the torpedoes! Four bells! Mr. Striker, take us ahead into the fray,” Rong-Arya said with a laugh that soon infected the rest of the crew as the Stiletto came about, pointing its ram prow at the heart of the Borg formation, its massive engines flaring enormously, causing the frigate to surge forward like a rapier thrust from a lunging duellist.

“Mr. O’Hare, if you would be so kind as to give me the intercom,” Rong-Arya asked, sword in one hand, pistol in the other, and Borg blood splattered on their face and uniform.

“Aye-aye ma’am!” O’Hare replied, snickering at the absurdity of the scenario. He then nodded when it was ready.

“All hands, this is the captain speaking. We are currently about to plunge head first into the enemy position, so preparing for impact would be advised at this time. Also, I appear to have decided that today is silly accent day, so crew hands are asked put on their best pirate voice while officers are urged to speak like 19th Century British Royal Navy officers. Stiff upper lip when facing these knaves and all that. What do you say to that?” Rong-Arya announced.

Even as blast doors sealed across the ship the cries of “YAAAAAAR!” could be heard on the bridge.

After a moment O’Hare said, “The Space Marines request to know which silly accent they should adopt.”

“Tell those daft leathernecks to give me an oorah!” Rong-Arya demanded flippantly while decapitating a drone.

After a moment O’Hare said, “Response is ‘Oorah’.”

Laughing aristocratically, Rong-Arya shot the bowels out of another drone before saying, “Maybe those Devil Dogs will put some steel in the spines and fire in the bellies of these daft knaves!”

“Wrong century my captain and I suspect the sentiments will be reversed, but good show nonetheless,” Ichiro-Faust said in a bad faux British accent.

“Mr. Ichiro-Faust, I suspect that none of the tongues we are so aping have ever been used outside of bad motion pictures. Oh ho! Let the cheese flow like water and deal with it, for the madness has taken us. All hands, brace for impact!” Rong-Arya cried out theatrically as the Stiletto plunged into the heart of the Borg formation.

Aside from beaming hundreds, possibly thousands of drones in a vain attempt to seize the ship, the Borg had also been hammering away at bare hull as the Stiletto bore down at relativistic speeds on their position, firing cutting lasers and torpedoes as quickly as they could. The warship was awash with plasma and several deep cuts had been gouged where focused fire had hit weak points, but the mighty warship had yet to suffer anything that could really stop it. Its entire ram prow glowed white with thousands of strikes from dozens of cubes, but the materials that made it up could handle much worse.

Like a burning arrow, the Stiletto plunged into the Borg formation, its prow slicing through the tangled jumble of piping and machinery that was a Borg cube like it was made of butter. In an astonishingly tiny fraction of a second the Stiletto was through and ploughing into another cube, burning its retros as it went, shedding velocity while frying enemy ships as effectively as if they had been hit by direct weapons fire. They punched straight through four cubes before they came to a relative stop.

Once slowed down enough, the weapon mounts that had been covered up to avoid being ripped off by the ramming popping out of their covers to begin blazing away at the targets in all directions.

“The scoundrels that did so wound us are ahead my captain!” Xavier announced, affecting a French aristocratic accent.

“Ah! Then ram them you Napoleonic bastard!” Rong-Arya declared.

“Non! It is the Louis who I serve! For the Crown!” Xavier announced, cackling as Striker throttled the engines once more.

“Yar! Just do it ya poncy bilge rat!” One of the anti-boarding crew announced while chainsawing a drone to death.

“I am an officer and a gentleman good sir! Of course I will do it!” Striker replied as the Stiletto bore down on the relatively tiny ship now desperately trying to get away.

As a last ditch effort the assimilated Son’a ship tried to fire its subspace weapon again while getting out of the way, but unfortunately it only managed to get clipped by the Stiletto and launch its destructive and unpredictable weapon straight into the remains of the transwarp gate… where there were still functioning and energized transwarp coils.

“Oh. Shit,” Rong-Arya noted a swirling green and black vortex of fractured space-time opened up off their port bow. “Get us out of here!”

“Already on it ma’am!” Striker announced as he engaged the engines to try and take them out of range of the rapidly expanding singularity.

“Gravitational fields are increasingly exponentially. We’re getting drawn in!” Xavier cried out.

Outside the Borg ships that had not already been destroyed discovered to their chagrin that they were now falling towards a ravenous maw of non-reality that was ready to rip their ships apart with glee, and not only were their engines not quite up to the task, but there was also a perceptible ‘wind’ of debris and nebula gas that was really not helping in their efforts to escape annihilation. Already the metreon gas was igniting, damaging ships that had so far escaped the battle untouched.

“Engines are at 95% captain!” Striker announced as the tidal forces fought to suck them in, causing the whole ship to shake violently.

“Put them to max! We need every scrap of thrust we can get!” Rong-Arya ordered.

“But the resonance in engine four…” Striker began before seeing the look in his captain’s face and he quickly shoved the throttle all the way open.

For a time the Stiletto hung in space upon a pillar of blue plasma, struggling for every centimetre of ground as it tried to climb out of the massive gravity well that was devouring the Borg down to the last drone and setting the entire nebula on fire, the whole thing rattling as the tides and the number four tried to shake apart. Something had to give.

With a bang and a massive lurch the number four engine failed, the flaw in its construction that had prevented it from ever being properly powered up causing the entire thing to nearly come loose and force an automatic shut off. Unfortunately for half a second the thrust was completely unbalanced and the Stiletto went into a massive spin before the other engines cut off as well.

“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck…” Someone screamed out.

Struggling to get strapped into their chair, Rong-Arya cried out, “All power to the Gellar field! Maybe we can ride it out like a Warp storm!”

Spinning wildly, the Stiletto plunged into the rift and towards shores unknown.

---

How's that for foreshadowing? 150 pages ago I mentioned the engine trouble and now you see why the Stiletto was spinning when the Galactica found them. All planned. Just as planned in fact. Or was it? Next chapter will either be OMG or Haruhi.

[von Neufeld]

Oh, very good. The pirate stuff was a nice touch.