17 Aevum Oblivio Popcorn

Technician Zhe clung to the shell of his new Devilfish with every claw he possessed – and that was quite a few. The vengeful voidhunter tore through a thick strata of gray-green clouds, purring with ecstasy as it felt sweet acceleration for the first time in more than a century.

But it wasn’t the sheer speed and ferocity of the Devilfish that Zhe was most interested in… the creature was locked tight to the Multiplicity net through a set of needle-probes deep in its tiny brain. Usually the net would be utterly silent this far from Liquid Space. But not now. Not today.

Zhe heard the screams of doomed Menials and Excisors as they broke clear of the cloud layer, spinning clear in the thin atmosphere. He caught the savage howls of Ogres and Bastarnae as they hacked their foes to scrap, the clipped, clinical tones of Captains and boarding-craft Agha… and behind it all hummed the immense, hot elation of the Multiplicity’s ships-of-the-line, overjoyed at the sensation of battle. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like they were winning.

As the Technician watched, a great Dracorex U.O.V grappled with the hulk of a Blacksteel cruiser in the upper atmosphere, pressurized green blood hissing from a thousand wounds across its broad carapace. The Unnecessarily Offensive Vehicle was spawned to take down whole platform-cities in the storms of gas-giant worlds, and its saw-tipped tentacles had crushed the waist of the Motherbrain’s thrall down to a twist of ruin. But the cruiser was far from finished – its own scourge-whips were out, pulled tight around the Dracorex’s shell, slicing through it with monomolecular bandsaw edges.

The Praetorian warship screamed its defiance as they both fell, powering down toward the unseen mass of continental Afrika below. Seconds later a roiling cluster of fusion explosions gutted the belly of the clouds… and that was only the nearest skirmish to Zhe’s position. All across the scarred globe the sky was slashed by lines of incandescent fire, smart torpedoes and particle beams weaving a tapestry of death.

Kataphrakt Yrr Bosphasian was outnumbered. He’d been relying on the sheer brutal firepower of the Geocore to hammer his foes into submission, but he’d been comprehensively played.

Now it had come down to dirty, savage ship-to-ship fighting… and that was the Unity’s specialty. Sure, the Praetor’s Order of Battle were the meanest, most bloody-minded creatures ever gene-sequenced, but even they needed help to breathe in vacuum. On the surface of a planet the Multiplicity could run rings around the lumbering mekanik soldiers of the Motherbrain. But space was home to the machines. And they pressed their advantage with precisely calculated viciousness.

It was all food for the Worm.

+ Soon to find the Traitor! Soon to crush and kill and devour! +

The Devilfish was picking up the harmonics of it through their umbilical nervebridge bond. Zhe had been touched by the thing he’d called the Worm; tainted and infected as Nyl used him to incubate his new hybrid form. Now he could feel the damned creature flexing and coiling its bulk behind the paper-thin wall of reality. The pain of a million deaths was quickening the Worm’s pulse, re-awakening it from the torpor it had fallen into after the Exodus, seventeen years ago.

All through the Aevum Oblivio it had been starving. Today, with mountains of flesh and steel crashing down to Earth like fallen stars, it was able to feed.

Just as Nyl intended.

The renegade Technician wanted to serve as midwife to Asag’raal’s spawn, and infect it with his mind. Zhe would have thought the whole plan utterly mad – if Nyl hadn’t already corrupted the Explorator Slavesystem Everdark. After that, it was all just a matter of good timing and luck.

"Klaeroc, instigate attack protocol 9-17," said Zhe, narrowing his eyes against the glare of maser blasts and antimatter detonations. "Take us in to the Tower. I want to cut right through that Slavesystem… and Gharfos Nyl as well!"

Around the leading edge of the Devilfish’s shell a corona of blue fire began to flicker and coalesce – the voidhunter was projecting its energy-field ahead of itself in the form of a blade. When they struck, they’d be traveling at a significant fraction of lightspeed, with all the tonnage and ferocity of a vengeful liquid-space predator built up behind that razor edge. Nyl’s signal burned red in Zhe’s augmented vision, a trace moving through the corridors of the Cardinal Rock toward the cryo-lab...

The first thing he’d do was kill Kaito Kayzi once and for all. Next, he’d snap CeeAn 187 in half. And then… then the Forge would be right under his thumb. And this time it wouldn’t be for show. It wouldn’t be a double-cross like last time, an illusion to get under Zhe’s skin. This time it was the REAL Gharfos Nyl walking the cold vaulted halls of the Terminal, in the flesh. And when he actually had the Forge at his command, he’d fuse his mind to that of the Harvester-Apostate Asag’raal…

The Praetor was going to be pissed. If there was one thing which the nigh-immortal Lord of the Multiplicity hated more than anything it was plausible competition.

"Not much time left, buddy. Better take what you can before your little friend puts me out of our misery."

The frozen shade of Kaito was there with him as he looked over his shoulder, standing atop the shell of Klaeroc as through they weren’t clipping mach five in a vertical spin.

"I know I’m just a conduit, but hells – half this stuff I didn’t even get to see myself. About now, in your little omnibus, I was trying not to throw up and keep my head from splitting."

"So what did happen to the other thirty-one of you? You seem pretty sane – by human standards."

"The big freeze, compadre. My meatware’s thawed out much faster than the parts of me in silico, thank goodness. All it means is that your buddy Nyl’s gonna speed up the inevitable… if I ever get out of this tank my brain’s gonna melt like butter."

"Always the optimist," drawled Zhe. "So, have you got anything else for me? I still can’t figure why you were frozen in there in the first place! You got pretty close to the Forge to be iced at the last moment…"

"Hang on then, Technician. This last part’s the good one. Hope you’ve got some popcorn on that thing…"

The Kayzi wasn’t kidding. Compared to the multiplex origami of images which had been sleeting through Zhe’s skull for the last four hours, this final jagged chunk of data was immense. Around the edges of it Zhe watched the Archangel Uriel pulling away from the Ashishi R.T, dragging a web of chains taut and dripping from the black ocean. A rough sliver of metal came loose with it; a floating island made up of hulks and rigs and barges teeming with refugees.

In front of the R.T. gates a wave of resurgent Saps broke over Joan Theophraxes and her Dervashi allies. She went down with a defiant prayer on her lips and another Exalted dying under her cruciform battle-hammer. Up above, Jimson Holgarth’s airborne escape-fleet winked signal mirrors and tight-band lasers down to the Uriel, plotting a course for Aggarta. CeeAn slept below, while up on the heaving deck of the double-sub a man named Devine was already sowing the seeds of her sainthood.

The images came faster and faster, blurred together into a spiked ball of light and shadow. Saprophytes rushing through dank subterranean corridors, a flood of living darkness. Out of the ocean on the far side of Elysium, a hand the size of an aircraft carrier scrabbling across the steel shore. Fires and panic. A man stranded on the shore, backlit by flames… Zhe watched him put a pistol up to his temple, laughing, and then…

"And then it all came down to the tower," said Kaito. "We all knew what was coming up after us. And those who’d made it to the final round… well, by that point, we had nothing to lose."

Zhe scowled as they looped out wide, pulling into a tight orbit to build up speed. It all came down to the Tower this time as well. But this time it wasn’t just a motley little crew of human beings ranged against Technician Nyl.

"Show me quick, Kayzi. I’m about to drop the curtain on this thing."

The specter laughed, exhaling twin plumes of cigarette smoke from his nostrils.

"Well… I’d ask ‘you and who’s army’," he said, with a fatalistic shrug to the scattered space-battle all around them, "But you seem to have that part covered, at least."

A rosette of violet fire shone through his phantom body as yet another Unity battleship burst apart, a short-lived and spectacular little star. His smile was a cold as space itself.

"Trust me. You’ll need them."