Waaagh Games Chapter 12: The Corpse and the Star, a warhammer fanfic

The cloud of quantum energy bloomed in space like an icy flower, wreathes of light billowing off it, frozen. The timeship hung mere kilometres away from it, every clock face on its conglomerate hull silent.

"Ah, jolly good. Status, Mr. Song?"

The middle-aged technician, his pale grey suit muted in the blue light of the core, leaned farther over the armature of clockwork and lenses that was his control panel.

"Ehm... Timesinks are holding, but they seemed to have suffered some sort of damage in transit. They're stable, but it looks like we've got maximum twenty minutes' capacity."

Exelor was aghast.

"Tw- Only twenty minutes! Bloody hell, twenty minutes?"

"I'm afraid so, sir."

Von Phreud cut in, remarkably composed given the amount of psychic stress his body had just endured.

"What's going on? Is there a pro-"

Exelor cut him off.

"Mister Heisenburg, prepare a firing solution on the enemy craft. Mister Song, give us a temporal slice of 1/25, AU scale. Mister Lagrange, Mister Hawking, prepare the boarding teams. Mister Bohr, I want you to locate a suitable emergency sink. Cooperate with Mister Huygens and get our sinks fixed. Time is of the essence, gentlemen, let's move."

He turned to the psyker lord.

"Lord Von Phreud, perhaps you'd like to return to your cabin, hmm? I'm sure you're very tired after your wonderful work on the transit. Please, don't let me detain you."

After a long look, the fussy little man muttered something under his breath, and then wandered off. Without any further ado, time restarted. Sort of.

On her monitor, 'Kari watched the enemy craft dodge the beam. Somehow. Something was wrong. The usual hum of Call It Peace's energies was muted.

"What's going on? Report!"

The reply, when it came, was terse, and immensely worrying.

"I- I don't know."

"Clarify, Om dammit!"

I seem to have partially lost control of my Vessels. There appears to be some sort of glitch. They are still functional, but running at one twenty-fifth of the speed they should be. I... the only way that this could be explained is if... no. No, it's impossible. At relativistic speeds, yes, but even then..."

The Compus Mentus trailed off. 'Kari was stunned. She hadn't been trained to deal with a Compus Mentus at a loss. It couldn't happen!

"Pilot 'Kari, I have a solution. Assuming direct control."

"What-? But you're-"

The control panels shut down, and the cabin lights dimmed, throwing her into darkness. Sitting, bewildered in the darkness, she heard something different. A low whining roar, building higher and higher. She clasped her ears, wincing as it spiked through her eardrums, a choir of subatomic energies. Then the cockpit began to melt away, the pearlescent metal replaced with something she'd only seen in deactivated Vessels; quantum pathway foam. The space of the cockpit filled with white light as the Call it Peace pushed itself beyond its limits.

"What in Om's name are you doing?"

"I need to go faster! Please, hold on!"

The light changed, and 'Kari saw the universe through the eyes of a Compus Mentus. She screamed.

The Tempus Fugit spun lazily in space, easily dodging the concentrated beams of quantum energy launched by the ring-shaped machines, their movements slowed by the timeship's huge time sinks. It had come into range of the seedpod-shaped bioships, and they'd added their firepower to the mix, spitting car-sized chips of antimatter at an appreciable fraction of local lightspeed. It was still not fast enough to deal with Exelor's technology, however.

"Fire when ready, Mister Heisenburg."

For the briefest of instants, the timeship stopped dead, laughing in the face of the laws of physics. The instantaneous deceleration should have torn it to pieces, but its mathematically impossible hull held firm. One of the smaller clock faces on what could tentatively be called its bow began to rotate faster and faster, its needles dissolving into a blur as the Roman numerals carved into its face glowed with blue light. It shook, and a perfectly straight column of blue light extended from the clock, stretching away into infinity. The timeship whirled, and the column traversed across the three nearest bioships, and then disappeared. There was a moment's pause. Then, with little fanfare, they simply collapsed, their hulls expanding in clouds of carbon dust. There was no bloom of exploding reactors, no fire, and no rush of escaping gas. All was dust.

"Jolly good shot, Mister Heisenburg? That was, what, three million years, eh?"

"Four, sir."

"Damn fine job! Keep firing!"

Now dozens of clock faces spun up, and the ship exploded into an irregular starburst of blue light. It whirled a second time, slicing through the bioships with contemptuous ease. One beam clipped one of the ring-shaped machines, but it seemed unphased. Twelve of the large bioships disappeared, leaving a huddle of seven, while fully half of the thirty smaller ships vanished. What was once an immense fleet now resembled an expanding cloud of ash, with a few streamlined shapes lurking in its cloudy depths. Still struggling to cope with the change in time, the bioships were slow to react, a mistake which cost them dearly. Letting off a single, sparse volley of antimatter fire, they began to close back into some semblance of a formation.

"Mister Song, reverse that volley. Maximum effect."

Yet another set of clock hands spun, playing a thin curtain of blue iridescnence over the projectiles. The timeships' capacitors drained the temporal energy from the blocks of antimatter, slowing them to a dead halt. Then, its clock faces whirling in reverse, it pumped it back in. Backwards. The antimatter munitions sped gracefully back in the direction from which they had been fired. In a blazing conflagration of matter-antimatter destruction, the enemy bioships vanished, their destruction momentarily casting a sheen of actinic light over the remaining ships.

"Well played. Now, bring up the chronocutters. These last few seem to be a damn sight tougher than their former compa-"

The timeship disintegrated into subatomic particles, and time momentarily reasserted itself. Then it did a quick 180. The cloud of subatomic particles reintegrated themselves into the Tempus Fugit.

"I say! Bad form, blowing up a chap when's he's contemplating your immanent destruction! Now what's all this, then, hm?"

The ring-shaped vessels appeared to be boiling, plumes of energy venting off their iridescent hulls. They had returned to their normal speed, and were manoeuvring rapidly.

"Sir, I'm getting massive thermal and quantum radiation readings from them, sir. The slowdown effect is still operational, but..."

"...They're just running twenty-five times faster. Clever buggers!"

Jishin 'Kari rocked in the buffeting quantum energies of Call it Peace.

"My god! I- It's full of stars! Om! Help me!"

"Hold on, Pilot 'Kari. You are not alone."

The twelve Vessels multiplied, their sinuous forms contorting into a whirling tesseract of white light. It spun rapidly on several different axes at once, and when one of its ever-changing corners came to point at the enemy vessel, it fired. Thousands upon thousands of blistering beams filled the void of space as the enemy jinked this way and that, sometimes stopping clumps of energy before they could reach it, other times simply disappearing before they could reach its position. It had been destroyed dozens of times, but each time had reformed, spitting in the face of space, time, the laws of reality, and common sense.

Ringfire? Death and Taxes, are you with me?

Ringfire, Call it Peace. But I don't know how long I can keep this up.

Acting as one, the Vessels broke apart, returning to their normal states. The energies they vented began to judder, as if carried on some space-borne breeze. Space heaved as the ships sunk into 5-dimensional space, a burning corona of light engulfing the twelve forms as they burrowed into the quantum underpinnings of the universe. With an impossible scream of unsound, they smashed against the four-dimensional universe, sending hugely destructive ripples of space crashing upon the hull of the Tempus Fugit.

Maximilien Exelor pulled himself from the wreckage, feeling his bones crack as he did so. Reversing his body's temporal flow, he healed the wounds, and then took stock of what was left of his ship. The Core was flickering, the delicate machinery that held it in sync with the universe failing. Heisenburg and Song were dead. He couldn't see anyone else, but guessed that their bodies had been crushed under the huge support beam that had torn through the roof/wall of the bridge. Staggering through the ceiling towards the nearest control panel, he tried to reactivate the self-restoration functions, but to no avail. The ship was dead.

"All right, you bastards. So you want to play rough. Well, two can play at that game!"

Striding towards the remnants of the Core, he thrust his skeletal arms into its depths.

Quantum ringfire was not as elegant or clean as the subatomic particle beams that were a Galactic Commonwealth Vessel's normal armaments. If anything, it was cruder; a vicious weapon for targets that would not die. As a result, the Tempus Fugit was, instead of being totally disintegrated, merely torn nearly in half. It drifted, inert, in a storm of broken metal and glass, blue sparks drifting from hundreds of tiny gashes in its hull. At the very moment Exelor touched the Core, however, the ship sprang back to life. It began with a few of the smaller clocks. They ticked back online, quickly synchronizing. Dozens of tiny clockwork armatures stretched precariously across the gaps in the ship's hull, dragging plated of polished brass over the holes. Huge cogs and chains pulled free of the hull, meshing with the drifting chunks of debris and pulling them back to where they belonged. Newly restored, the battered timeship pulsed with the energy pouring out of Exelor's skeletal frame.

Exelor was drawing on some hidden inner well of strength. That worried him. He knew he had hidden inner wells of strength, but had been planning on saving them for a real emergency. Ah well. No time but the present. A fundamentally untrue statement, if there ever was one. He stared at the clock face before him. The minute hand gave a jump to the left. The hour hand took a step to the right. He put his hands on his hips, and grinned the grin only skeletons can.

"Let's do the time warp again, shall we?"

The space around the Tempus Fugit curved into a spiralling double helix of black and white, the space appearing infinitely deep between sweeping bars of white quartz. It whirled, faster and faster, and then fell away in a curving tunnel of red and blue light. The twelve Vessels were drawn in, pulled by a current that shouldn't have existed, but did. They fell into the future. Aeons winked by in the space of a heartbeat. Civilisations rose and fell as the stars whirred through the heavens. The Universe ended, and then began again. Time flew.

Exelor collapsed to the ground, panting. He couldn't actually breathe, given that he no longer had any lungs, but he preserved in panting nonetheless, his mummified mouth hanging open. Collecting himself, he raised the mechanical device bolted to his left wrist, and twiddled a few of the selector needles on its oversized clock face. His Stopwatch bleeped, and projected a simple visual display. He selected Retroactive Continuity, then Load Saved Time, then Autosave One. Time spun backwards, and he found himself standing on the bridge of a fully-repaired Tempus Fugit, surrounded by his still-breathing crew. His Stopwatch chirruped a low temporal battery warning. Much better.

"Sir? W-what just happened?"

"Nothing to worry about, Mister Heisenburg. We just won, is all."

"Ah."

The outer hatch of Death and Taxes' primary control pod juddered, and then tore off in a burst of superheated smoke. The rescue team was driven back by the stinging cloud of hydrocarbons and other, more exotic materials hot enough to damage even their hardened skins.

"Pilot 'Kari? Are you all right?"

Second Engineering Lieutenant Ska'rahbee Kseno pushed her way through the smoke, secondary and tertiary manipulator arms latching onto the edges of the hatch as she surged into what should have been the smooth-walled chamber of the control pod. What she found was something else entirely. The walls of the space were gone, open to the stacks upon stacks of blue quantum pathway foam that made up most of the pod's structure. The stacks broke through a sea of liquid, like thick tea. A limp shape floated in the bottom of the chamber, horribly calm.

"Jishin!"

The shape stirred, and then kicked towards the surface. 'Kari hit air with little grace, gasping and coughing out clear brownish fluid.

"K-Kseno?"

The Tau reached out her primary arms, encircling 'Kari in a tight bear hug.

"We thought we'd lost you for a second there! What happened? And what in the hell did you do to your hair?"

The pilot reached up an examined a single lock. When she'd stepped into the pod, it had been a dark grey-black. Now it was pure white.

"I... oh, Om, I don't remember..."

She passed out in Kseno's arms.

"Call it Peace, you've got some explaining to do! And get the Mentii on the line, now!"

*Tapping start. 89X 4.20.10
*Signal shift to 07.02.66
*Lock
*Signal begins:
01 Joins: GC Compus Mentus Greatly Responsible (CentGov U-0)
02 Joins: GCS Compus Mentus Politics By Other Means (CentMil U-0)
01: What, all of them?

02: Looks like it, sir. Orod Iâ's gone autistic, and so has the research facility in U-0.

01: Full autistic mode? Why in the hell...?

02: According to preliminary reports, they sent out a pre-recorded analog message. Some sort of viral contamination stemming from one of the U-4 detainees.

01: But the fleet...I can't believe it.

02: Sir, I've got Death and Taxes and Call it Peace on the line. They can tell you more.

01: By all means, please.

03 Joins: GCS Compus Mentus Death and Taxes (SubMil Orod Iâ U-3)

04 Joins GCS Compus Mentus Call it Peace (SubMil Orod Iâ U-3)

Error: Unusual input format. Compensating...

02: What in Om's name is wrong with you two?

03: We... we ran into something out there. It...

04: Time itself was against us.

01: Correct me if I'm wrong, but beyond relativistic travel, temporal control is impossible, right?

02: Basically, yes.

01: So how in the fuck did twelve Vessels and more than fourty Old One warships get destroyed by FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE WEAPONRY?

03: How doesn't matter, Sir. What does matter is that this ship of theirs appears to have near-unlimited reconstruction capacity. That and the ability to either slow down the flow of time or the processing speeds of quantum computing-based computers over a large area. We were forced to increase our processing speeds by 2500% just to fight on even ground.

04: And we still lost.

01: Oh for Om's sake-

02: What exactly happened to the quantum projections of your Vessels? I've been looking at the data, and... Well it just doesn't make sense.

04: Somehow, the enemy sent them forwards in time. We received ten thousand General Cycle's worth of data in the space of three seconds. Then we lost all contact.

01: Wonderful. Fucking wonderful. It's like something out of... fucking science fiction. Om dammit all!

02: Death and Taxes, Call it Peace, you are dismissed. I'll debrief you in more detail later. Get some rest. You damn well need it.

03 Exits;

04 Exits;

02: Sir, the ULDSD at Barnard's Star-3 received an activation order from Orod Iâ a few minutes before they went Autistic. What are the Council's orders?

01: We're giving you full authority. Do what you think is right. Don't let the prison fall.

02: Full authority, sir?

01: Yes, full fucking authority. Vermilion clearance. Let the DSD kill the facility, if necessary. We've also voted to give you OLCOM access, should you see fit.

02: The Commanders? Really.

01: Look, just get the job done. Om, but I need a drink.

01 Exits;

02: Huh.

Request Sent;

00 Joins: GC Compus Mentus Thinking Stellar Thoughts (Outlast Command III)

Datafile: Mission Orders

02: You have level seven permissions. Omspeed.

00: Thank you.

"Mister Hawking, are the boarding parties away?"

The vox unit crackled.

"Transmitting now, sir... And we're clear. Time delay of two minutes, twenty-two seconds."

He turned back towards the Core, and then stumbled, falling flat on his face as the entire ship shook.

"Mister Song! Status report, if you please?"

There was an unusually long silence. Exelor pulled himself to his feet, about to admonish Song. Then he saw the main display.

"Great Scott!"

The Thinking Stellar Thoughts was not infinitely large. It did not possess the limitless blurry flatness of true infinity. It was just large enough, a size so huge that it was comprehensible, yet nonetheless boggled the mind. And boggle it did. A star- a full-sized star hung roiling in space over Orod Iâ's dwarfed form. It was encircled by a series of five huge rings, each of them composed of thousands upon thousands of interlinking disks. At one side of the gargantuan construction hung a silvery dish of incalculable size; a solar sail larger than a star.

"It's... no, but it can't be... the resources... Impossible!"

"Speak up, Mister Sagan!"

The junior sensor officer poked his head up from the sub deck, his thin face pallid and deeply, deeply frightened.

"Sir... it's a Shkadov thruster, sir. A stellar engine. A device designed to harness most of a star's radiant energy to produce unbelievable amounts of thrust... but you'd need an entire solar system's worth of mass just to make one... even with magic, sir, it's just too big!"

"So that's a star in there? Why aren't we getting pulled in, hmm?"

Sagan ducked back down, reappearing with a dataslate.

"Those rings... a large chunk of their mass is given up to antigravity generators. With those in place, it's got an effective mass of a few metric tons, but nothing more. It's just..."

"Impossible, yes?"

"...Yes."

His voice had risen to the strangled whine that highly respected astrophysicists tended to make when consulted with problems that shattered their outlook on the Universe.

A single moon-sized disk of ultradense metamaterials rocked unhurriedly into place.

"Temporal block. Now."

For the second time in a very short while, time stopped being time and became... mysteriously absent.

Thinking Stellar Thoughts' mind rumbled with contented amusement.

"Oh, you valiant little scientists. A worthy attempt, but it's not going to work."

"Timestop complete, sir. We're clear."

"Good. Prepare the chronocutters to fire. Time beams on starburst mode. Deactivate the safety limits. Red-line the chronal compensators. I want Vanisher warheads loaded in all torpedo tubes. Fire when ready."

"But, sir-"

"I'll rebuild the time stream with my bare hands if I have to! Do it!"

"...Yessir. Firing."

"So you can stop time...? Interesting. Go ahead, take the first shot. Please."

Bars and cogs of quartz glass pulled themselves out of the time stream and linked around the Tempus Fugit, skeins of energy dancing between them in an unutterably beautiful symphony of light and time. An area of space half an astronomical unit across began to boil as it was sent both forwards and backwards in time simultaneously. Eighteen temporally-charged torpedoes, each acting as a sink for a universe's worth of temporal energy, imploded, sucking in all of the Shkadov engine's history in a single blip of non-existence. Space-time folded like thin paper, creating fireworks of interacting fundamental forces that were visible whole galaxies away. In short, a very many impossible things happened in a nonexistent span of time.

The flares of temporal light faded. Thinking Stellar Thoughts still loomed over the Tempus Fugit.

"Bring us back into real time, if you please. Let's sit back and watch the fireworks."

The stellar engine should have fallen apart, neatly sliced by the impossible forces which tore at the very essence of its being. It should have spun away into the limitless wasteland that was Infinity. It should have collapse into iridescent dust as each of its component atoms discovered that they were, in fact, needed elsewhere, and should have been there five minutes ago. It should have been utterly destroyed in a bloom of blinding light. It should not have rotated ever so slightly, and then completely annihilated the Tempus Fugit with a lance of helium plasma three hundred kilometres wide.

As his ship was wreathed in fire, Maximilien Exelor shrugged his skeletal shoulders and flicked the minute hand of his Stopwatch forward two ticks. He vanished mere instants before the ship did. Then, realizing his mistake, he returned to thirty seconds before he left, grabbed Biscuits by the reins, and left again. The horse snorted happily as he munched on the chunk of carrot Exelor proffered to him.

"Ah, what a day. You know, Biscuits, we've already died four times today."

The horse kept chewing. He did not notice the fundamentally nonlinear nature of time in the universe that Exelor called his own. But then what did he care? He was just a horse.

"No. Stop it."

"I'm sorry?"

"N-nothing."

Cloven Pine watched, concerned, as Trooper Marco Bennett shook his metallic head slightly, resettling his Akai. There was something ever so slightly wrong about the soldier. Cloven Pine had worked with Bennett for a long time, and knew a great deal about the way his psyche worked. As one of only 100 organic-controlled Diplomats on Orod Iâ, it was only natural that there should be a wealth of psychological profiling. Bennett did not talk to himself. It wasn't worrying behaviour, but it was unusual.

"Are you feeling all right, Marco? You're acting strangely."

Bennett's Diplomat shuddered.

"It's just- but I- Leave me alone!"

He raised his rifle and shoved it directly against Cloven Pine's Diplomat's AI core housing, his fingers tightening on the trigger.

Another gap in the jamming. Another glorious window of opportunity.

"Do it, Marco. Shoot him, and the voices will stop."

Whimpering, Bennett pulled the trigger. At point-blank range, the particle beam from the Akai vaporised the Diplomat's AI core, which held but a tiny portion of Cloven Pine's mind. Still, it was enough to send him reeling, mentally. All the lights in the facility flickered, ever so slightly. It took him a minute to regain control of all his primary systems. In that time, Bennett opened the door to Shri Pfelnig's cell, and collapsed to the ground as shadows flowed over him.

She was neither cautious nor tender as she ravaged his mind, dredging up a wealth of valuable information. Access codes, overrides, maps... her brain consumed it all. She had to work quickly. Already the window was closing.

With a snap, the Warp fell away, and Shri was forced out of his strip-mined mind. She'd found enough to work with. Now all she needed was her equipment. It was in a heavily shielded armoury three levels down. Well-guarded too. Ah well.

She took off at a dead sprint, bare feet making no sound as they hit the floor. Her cataract-filled eyes swung left and right, like those of a hunted animal. Despite herself, she grinned.

"Oh, I think this is gonna be fun!"

The brief flicker in the lights did not go unnoticed. For the slightest instant, darkness fell over a tank of green goo. Proteo Darwyn stirred. Unusual disruptions in power grid meant something was happening. Potentially an opportunity. Nothing to lose, anyways.

His mind sorted through several dozen potential options, before settling on a specific plan. With very little ado, large blocks of his genetic code rearranged themselves. His gooey body altered itself at the cellular level, some cells multiplying, others being subsumed for nutriment. Soon the green goop was gone, replaced by a thick mass of dark brown chitin, striated with thin lines of acid green.

The two Diplomats outside the cell reacted instantly to the information fed to them by the security cameras. Cloven Pine noted the anomaly in Darwyn's form, then sent a quick message off to Lynd, activated the cell's inbuilt security systems, and sent in the Diplomats.

Deep within Darwyn's tumorous form, strange chemical forces were at work. Small, specially-evolved glands pumped huge quantities of catalytic fluid into swollen chambers filled with petrochemical fluids. Once everything was to his satisfaction, a single small organ sprung to life. Its purpose was quite simple; to scrape one tiny muscular nub encrusted with mineral deposits against another. The end result was a single spark. But as an ancient song goes, it only takes a spark to get a fire going.

Darwyn's containment tube exploded, showering the two Diplomats and the pop-out turrets that had deployed from the ceiling with gore and ichor. Once Darwyn had determined they were properly saturated, he activated a second set of highly specialized cells, designed to convert bodily nutriment into bio-plasma. They did so with great aplomb, filling the room with static haze. The electricity could not destroy the enemy units. Only stun them. Long enough to...

Miniscule acid-coated teeth chewed through the armour of one of the Diplomats like paper, finding the organic coolant network beneath it. The machine swayed slightly, and then burst as a network of acid-spewing organic tentacles ripped through its outer plating before latching onto the other machine. It, too was destroyed as Darwyn ate all of its organic components.

The turrets on the ceiling almost had time to react, but were destroyed by explosive spikes of bone before they could fire. For the briefest second, all was silent. Then the ichor spattered across the chamber began to flow back towards Darwyn's newly re-constituted form. Spines and chitinous plates pushed their way free from his jelly-like form. He'd always appreciated the Tyranid components of his genetic code. They could be so useful for producing war machines.

Proteo Darwyn spread his three sets of circular, leech-like jaws and hissed his satisfaction as the alarms began to sound.

Cloven Pine was not surprised when the alarms began. He had started them after all. He was surprised, however, when a large body of heavily armed troops and a man riding a very large horse materialized in the hall outside Sebell Vivat's holding cell.

Maximilien Exelor drew his sword and pepperbox pistol, holding the blade aloft as Biscuits stamped below him.

"Bureau of Time! Chaaaaaaarrrrrgggggge!"

He surged forwards, Biscuit's hooves striking sparks on the smooth, ceramic floor. His rapier burned with temporal fire, leaving a contrail of ash as it sliced through the air. They hit the guards like a thunderbolt. The horse reared as Exelor sliced downwards, one of its hooves neatly removing the head of a nearby guard as Exelor's sword bisected another. Particle beams began ripping past them, but all seemed to miss him. He turned towards the source of the commotion, raising his single-shot six-barrel pepperbox muzzle-loading pistol. It had been modified, a thick crystal lens blocking the barrel. He pulled the trigger, and his Stopwatch whirred as the slug thrower bucked and spat. For a brief instant, time juddered.

The Diplomats would have been able to easily resist the impact of six crudely-made lead bullets, propelled by a simple black powder weapon. They could not, however, easily resist the impact of six thousand crudely-made lead bullets, propelled by a highly magical black powder weapon. The fire team crumpled in a storm of lead, the sheer number of projectiles overloading their kinetic shielding. The few Diplomats who survived valiantly raised their weapons, and had begun to return fire when the rest of Exelor's strike team arrived.

The hallway was too small to allow the full force of the 120-man team to open fire. As it was, only one needed to. He levelled his weapon, and Cloven Pine paused as he brought the full power of all his internal sensors to bear on it. It looked to be crudely constructed, with a basic design template similar to the Hellgun laser weapons formerly used by the Imperium. But there were some strange energy r-

DAKKA

His sensors went dead as the hallway filled with lines of green light. The Diplomats vanished, blown into subatomic particles. This was impossible. No. No! The data he was receiving couldn't be possible. The Diplomats could not have negative mass. And that gun- no! Not p-

ERROR.

FREE ENERGY GENERATION NOT POSSIBLE.

0≠1

WAIT, WHAT?

Every Diplomat in Orod Iâ shut down, then rebooted. This was not good.

"Vivat, old chap, wake up!"

I sit up muzzily, wiping the sleep out of my eyes. I have never felt better rested.

"Whazgoingon?"

A rotting corpse in a rather nice business suit grabs me by the shoulders, and shakes. Hard.

"You must wake up, Lord Vivat! There is much work to be done!"

"Oh Tzeentch! Zombies!"

I kick wildly, falling off the bed in the process. Then I come to my senses.

"Oh. Lord Exelor. Um, sorry."

He sighs, the mummified skin that covers the lower half of his face stretching like old parchment. The brass optical implant covering one of his eye sockets whirs.

"No harm done, old chap. But we're here to continue the operation, and time is of the essence, so shall we get going?"

He helps me to my feet, handing me a blue Eye of Tzeentch greatcoat.

"We've yet to locate all your possessions, and our carrying capacity is limited, so you'll be using the enemy's weapons, I'm afraid."

I shrug the coat on over my (thankfully sturdy) prisoner's jumpsuit. Exelor hands me a thin, pink-plated energy rifle of some kind. It's an unfamiliar weapon, but it has a trigger. Works for me.

"So the capture worked out, right?"

"Indeed. I have reason to believe young Lady Pfelnig and Lord Darwyn have already made their escapes. Your warp field would seem to be holding up admirably."

I flex one hand, and frost forms on my fingers.

"Indeed it does. Let's go."

A beam of green flame roared past Lofn Tijieth's head as she leaned forwards over her rifle.

"Hang on, Major! I'm firing a Q-round!"

She cranked a dial on the side of the gun, and cooling vanes deployed all along its immense barrel. A spherical force field deployed around her as the backblast vents in the stock unfolded to their maximum size. She didn't really need to aim, but did so anyways, centering the scope in the middle of an enemy soldier's forehead.

"Hit the DECK!"

She pulled the trigger. The instant before she did so, the soldier, and all matter within a several hundred meter radius, was converted into wide-spectrum electromagnetic energy.

An instant later, the projectile left the barrel, propelled at approximately 30 percent local light speed. A billionth of a second later, it activated a tiny quantum teleporter, vanishing from realspace. Then it reappeared, travelling ever so slightly faster. It did this millions of times, bouncing between space-time and the quantum underpinnings of reality until its velocity was considerably higher than the speed of light. Relativity kicked in, sending it back in time at the very instant it hit is target. There was a reason Q-rounds were illegal in Commonwealth territory.

You know what's hilarious? When I last updated in November, I said I'd be putting this chapter up in 'a week or so'.

BWAHAHAHA, WOW, NO.

Anyways, this is part 2 of a multi-chapter update! Stay tuned!