17 Aevum Oblivio Core

"I want them driven back!" snarled Kataphrakt Yrr, clenching his fighting claws around the arms of his command throne. "Let the sacrifice of the Brutality be a lesson to you all – this battle will only be won with blood and courage!"

Ropes of steaming mucous spattered from his jaws as he spoke – drool laced with pheromones to drive his Bastarnae into a battle-frenzy.

Blood and courage. Meat for the grinder of war.

Yrr’s loyal captains stared down at him from a hexagonal mesh of holoscreens, a great shimmering honeycomb surrounding his throne like a stained-glass hemisphere. And the neural shunt made them feel his anger and his resolve, flooding their alien brains with stimulants. Some hissed and roared and fluttered their mandibles in artificial rage; others, without the benefit of discernible facial features, simply let their actions do the talking.

All along the battle-line Yrr’s forces redoubled their efforts, throwing themselves against the spaceborne wall of the Unity again and again. The line of engagement ran between Mars and Earth now… unacceptably close to the prize. At the core of the Motherbrain’s offensive was the Behemoth-Class hub of the slave-fleet; greatly diminished, but still the size of a small moon. Silver cylinders flanked the Hub along a three-light-minute line, ablated smooth by space-dust and nebular clouds until they shone like slivers of diamond. Some were supercarriers, things like the vessel which the Justifiable Brutality had taken down. Others were monolithic slabs of weaponry; dreadnaught-killers and planetary assault ships armed with fusion cannons big enough to swallow lesser spacecraft whole.

These formed a regimented line along the curve of Earth’s orbit, pulled up in ranks like ancient infantrymen. Tiny drone fighters ran cover between them, swarming in an endless moebius loop around their tenders, while the dreadnaughts fired in rolling volleys, picking off Teuthis Rex and Princeps voidhunters one by one.

Yrr watched as a cluster of Unity heavy battlecruisers drew down on a vast, flat-shelled Tyrant-class missile destroyer, focusing a score of cannons on its broad carapace. Its shields spat mile-long arcs of purple flame as the beams converged, all focused on a single point… but there was no way that the doomed ship could withstand all that concentrated energy. First the shields failed, then the heat-transfer substructures welded to its yard-thick shell…

Yrr shut down his link to the Tyrant’s captain as he watched a razor beam of light come slicing in through the wall of its command nexus, rushing up behind the captain’s throne even as he turned, his eight eyes wide with terror…

The screams were always the same. Every time one of the living warships of the Praetor died, Yrr wished that his people could trust in steel and carbon and ceramic-composite like their foes.

He’d have to break the line. Draw their fire, before the relentless advance of the Blacksteel brought them any closer to Earth. Behind the wall of dreadnaughts and carriers with their swarming thralls, Yrr could make out the wasp-striped cylinders of the Unity’s ground offensive – troop carriers packed with mekan, A.I. slaved tanks and lumbering Colossi.

"Subjugation, tell the Commanders of the anchor-ships to prepare for a pincer movement. Take them up and over the line, englobe their flanks, and push them into the center. Then prepare the first Geocore for firing."

++ Delighted to, my Admiral!++ squealed the portal carrier ship, its miles-wide bulk trembling with glee. ++We have twenty-two Geocores in the Null Storage Strata… with a uniform weight of twenty-nine billion tons. Fire control will be slaved to dear Schnarga within a matter of moments.++

Whole planets were reamed out to make the Geocores, vast cylindrical slugs of nickel and iron which formed the Effortless Subjugation’s most potent weapon. The portal at its heart tangled up the laws of physics like a snarl of yarn, warping and twisting the very meanings of terms like ‘gravity’ and ‘mass’ and ‘velocity’. You really didn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity when a Geocore was fired, and that was why the Thrall-species who crewed the Subjugation were strapping themselves into their seed-shaped pods, scrabbling and cursing in a hundred alien languages.

Yrr, as an esteemed Kataphrakt-Admiral, comported himself with more dignity than his slaves. As the whole coral-like latticework of the portal carrier began to stretch and attenuate he tapped out a code on the floating keyboard before him, gathering up his cape with his gracile secondary claws. The floor beneath his command throne shimmered silver for an instant, then rippled like water. A pale, jointed tentacle quested up over the lip of the pool, followed by another and another, dripping with the stuff of liquid space.

++I am with you, master! Onward together, for glory!++

Schnaarga levered its immense bulk up and out of the water, poised on the tips of its tentacles like some kind of nightmare crustacean. Yrr’s throne unfolded a set of insectile metal legs to grip the ochre dome of the Devilfish’s shell, and a second set of spidery limbs to affix the Kataphrakt’s armor.

"We’re going to give them a taste of the Geocore, my pet," Chuckled Yrr, lifting his arms one by one to accept the hard outer carapace with its inlaid lapis and bronze. "Bloodlust aside, it should be nothing less than spectacular. Remember the orbital arcologies over Nyricu Six? Just like that!"

Now the diamond dome split open along invisible seams, sending the atmosphere within howling off into the vacuum. Rebreather tubes behind Yrr’s damascened faceplate began to sigh and hiss as the artificial gravity cut them loose, and Schnaarga trilled with delight. The Devilfish wasn’t happy unless it was in the thick of battle, and the firing of a Geocore was a special treat. When all those tiny burnt bodies had come spilling out of the sky-cities of Nyricu, Schnaarga had gorged on flesh until its second stomach burst...

The Kataphrakt and his pet rose up above the stretching, distorting shape of the Effortless Subjugation, just as the thrall-pods burst out from it in every direction, the seeds from a moon- sized dandelion clock. They were made to disperse among the living capital ships which flanked the Portal Carrier – veteran Voidrazors and Castigators bristling with cannons and missile batteries.

All of their might was nothing, though, compared to the hideous force of the Subjugation itself. It was pulled out wide now, a ring of living matter around the seething blue iris of the portal. That ring was spinning, building up the energy it required to turn brute mass into pure energy; to fire a multi-million ton chunk of some dead planet’s core at a fraction below the speed of light.

Small wonder that even a mighty Kataphrakt couldn’t stay on board when it was activated…

The Subjugation’s rising scream of pleasure reached a skull-splitting crescendo as Yrr brought his claw down on the firing pin, watching his anchor-ships split the line of the Unity, peeling away defenses from the Behemoth hub.

And halfway between an orgasm and a fatal seizure, the Effortless Subjugation vomited up a slug of nickel and iron, drilled out of a dying world by a creature the size of a continent.

Most of it was ablated away as a shockwave of searing plasma the instant it cleared the portal – an accusatory finger stabbing out across the dark toward the Motherbrain’s line of battle. Inside that glowing corona, meshed up in a web of unholy lightning, the white-hot heart of the Geocore homed in on its target, as unstoppable as the fury of Gods…

This was the point at which the Subjugation was most vulnerable. A disruptor missile fired into the churning eye of the portal now would collapse it in on itself, creating a miniature black hole…

But the Unity forces were reeling from Yrr’s pincer strategy. And when space flared white at the center of their line, the Kataphrakt and his Devilfish howled in savage triumph, ancient endorphin-glands flooding their brains with ecstasy.

"All units, converge on the wreckage of the Hub! Ensnare any shielded A.I. cores you can find – we need them for interrogation!"

The comm band was awash with ululations and screams of joy – few, if any of the Order of Battle had ever been privileged enough to witness the power of a Geocore attack. But then again, it was a rare thing for the fleets of the Praetor and the Motherbrain to hammer at each other in space like this. Dau’mun had been the last great clash of space-armadas, and the death toll from that cataclysm was still being felt by both sides, nearly three hundred years on.

"Report, forward intel! What is the status of the Unity formation?"

Yrr could see the fighters and thrallships falling in toward the center of the Blacksteel line all around him – threads of white fire twisting against the darkness of space. Thousands of them, Stirges and Gorgons and Slavemasters, scavengers hungry for the remains of that doomed Behemoth…

"Fall back! Fall back! All units, this is forward intel cruiser Illuminator – the Hub is still intact! Repeat – the Hub is still intact!"

"Then what in His Name did we just hit?" roared Yrr, leaping from his throne to perch right at the edge of Schnaarga’s carapace. "Subjugation, how long until you can fire another Geocore?"

++Three minutes only, my Admiral!++ crooned the grossly distended Portal Carrier. ++Three-oh-seven and counting down…++

Yrr took the uplink from the Illuminator directly into his brain, bypassing the onion-skin layers of firewalls and shields which cradled his neural tissue. The Motherbrain had outplayed him, and he was determined to find out how…

It was a feint. The Hub had used its jump drives to slip sideways through the Aematrerium as the Geocore came screaming in on it, detaching a cluster of cylinder-ships from its tail as it fled. It had only gone under for a second – long enough to avoid the explosion - and it had reappeared spinning, bringing all its missile batteries to bear on the Effortless Subjugation. The shell of battleships it had sloughed off were a sacrifice, like a lizard’s tail cast off to evade a predator. They’d been utterly vaporized, for all that they were worth. But the Hub itself, the Behemoth – it had lured Yrr into a trap.

Even as he blinked the after-images of the Illuminator’s video feed from his eyes, Yrr could see a storm of smart torpedoes rising up from the jagged topography of the Unity hub, tens of thousands of them arrowing in toward the vulnerable portal.

Three minutes before the next Geocore could be launched. And in that time, the Motherbrain could turn it into a black hole ten times over…