Chapter Twenty: Brawl
Fate stumbled back, her eyes wide with shock while she tried to regain her composure at this completely unexpected revelation, but her knees were as weak as if someone had just punched her the in the gut. She tried to get something out, but all that she said was, "What?"
Nanoha for her part could only stare on in shock at the incredible distress her best friend was going through, and the incredible, impossible reason for that shock.
"Fate…" the scythe said again. "I'm so sorry."
"M-mother?" Fate asked, on the verge of breaking down in one form or another.
"Yes Fate, it's Precia, and I am so sorry," the scythe replied.
"Momma got a stern talking too over what she did to you," the little girl who had been waiting for them stated.
"Why is she a scythe?" Nanoha asked in horror while Fate tried desperately to keep herself together. Precia had featured in her fondest dreams and her worst nightmares over the past eleven years. For her mother to just say she was sorry and that she loved her was one of her most desperately desired things in life.
"Technically momma isn't the scythe, she's just bound to it as punishment for what she did to little sister Fate," the girl, Alicia said. "Oh, and to help look after me!"
Fate clutched at her head and stomach as she tried not to burst out crying or throw up. "This- this is impossible! You both died!"
"Only momma died, and even then, not fully. My stasis pod sheltered me in the Warp until the gods found us. They restored me to health and recovered momma's soul," Alicia explained.
"So you're really Alicia?" Nanoha asked incredulously.
"You can call me Ali!" The girl said proudly. "The gods sent me here to meet whoever came to find out about this world, and they sent me my little sister! They really want to meet you."
"They truly are great beings. They made me realize that I had two daughters-" Precia began, but that was more than enough for Fate, who promptly screamed and collapsed to the ground.
"Little sister!" Ali cried out, rushing over to Fate, but a warding hand from Nanoha kept her away.
With a few quick gestures Nanoha immediately had Fate teleported away while requesting someone else to come down to assist. Looking at Alicia- Ali- she said, "I think your sister has had too much excitement for one day. She's spent a long time getting over the fact that both of you died, only for you to both show up now."
Ali frowned, but the disembodied voice of Precia said, "I understand. It will take time for her to understand what has happened. Just tell her that I have come to terms with my actions. I love both my daughters and wish that I could go back in time to fix the mistakes I made."
Nodding, Nanoha said sternly, "She will appreciate that, although you should know that she has had an adoptive mother for many years who has already told her that."
Precia was saddened for a moment before she said, "Then I wish to meet this woman and thank her for raising such a fine young girl."
"Now could you tell me what is going on?" Nanoha demanded.
Ali nodded and was just about to speak when a different voice emanated from the staff, obviously as some sort of radio function. It was a deep, imposing male voice that said, "Ali, we're going to need you to get airborne, something weird is going on."
The Battle of the Supergate had been… it had been going. So far it was a stalemate as while the defenders of the Milky Way had prevented any more motherships from getting through, neither could they actually do anything to the ships on the other side of the gate, nor in fact do anything to the gate itself. So far the battle had degenerated into a delicate balance in the fighter combat. If enough fighters got through to threaten the Lucian Alliance Ha'taks, or even distract them from their overwatch, then the Ori could start shoving through more ships.
Considering that enough firepower to slag several continents had been poured into them, the fact that the Ori ships were debris and not expanding balls of diffuse gas spoke rather much of their defensive capacities. They probably had offensive abilities to match too.
So far the fast firing Tau'ri railguns had been reaping a fearsome toll on the Ori fighters, convincing them to stay well away from the trio of battlecruisers, but unfortunately Milky Way fighters were outnumbered ten to one, with reinforcements for the Ori arriving through the gate as fast as they took losses. With the Tau'ri providing close in defence for the Alliance, the Jaffa were putting up an impressive wall of flak about the gate, trying to destroy fighters as they came through. Unfortunately, sheer weight of numbers had already grounded the surviving 302s, all their munitions expended, including reloads from the ships, and the Jaffa were down to a scant few death gliders left, the rest having been shot down already. Only the Lucian Alliance's death gliders were still putting up a good fight, their piloting weirdly synchronized and skilled while their weapons systems seemed to have all been upgraded for faster firing.
Still, it was a delicate numbers game, and all it took was for a single change in variables to tip the balance one way or another. The system almost immediately started to tip the instant PD turret #3 went silent on the Odyssey due to total ammunition expenditure. It wasn't that that gun itself was particularly important, it was just that within the next thirty seconds 75 of the remaining railguns on the Tau'ri ships also ran dry, so that was the exact turning point.
When the guns went silent on the Tau'ri ships the Ori fighters immediately began to swarm in closer, firing bolts of bright blue energy that splattered harmlessly against their shields while moving in to harass the Lucian Alliance ships. Scores immediately died as the Alliance's own PD turrets began firing, but the damage was done. Ha'taks were in many ways designed almost as inefficiently as possible, so a significant chunk of firepower that had been keeping the noses of the Ori from peeking out the gate was now diverted to swatting down fighters.
A new Ori ship surged through the gate before it was pummelled into oblivion. But with its death one ship managed to slip through unmolested and get off a shot with its main weapon, sending a brilliant beam of yellow-white light out to cut straight through a Jaffa Ha'tak with a single hit, immolating it in an instant. This monster was also brought down under the combined fire from the defensive fleet, but two more had already cleared the gate.
The Ori fighters had been almost completely cleared away, reinforcements having halted in favour of getting through more capital ships, but by now the character of the battle had radically shifted. Now it was a ship to ship fight and the Ori had the better ships. Still, whoever had command of the Alliance ships was skilled in the arts of battle beyond anything that had ever before been seen in the Milky Way. Fire continued to be concentrated on tiny points on the Ori ships, collapsing their shields. But as more and more Ori ships came through the gate and began ripping apart ships with their fire, the barrages could no longer take down the shields completely, merely overwhelm the energy buffers for a few seconds.
The Tau'ri however had copied the trick the Ori had used to get so many of their fighters through the gate by sneaking several of their naquadah enhanced warheads through the debris field and then turning off their motors. For a time the Alliance ships would knock down the shields and there would be a conveniently placed twenty gigaton warhead sitting next to the ship. Eventually though they wised up and started shooting any bit of debris that got too close.
Twenty Ori motherships had emerged from the gate by the time they stopped coming, but twelve had been utterly destroyed by the tactics displayed during the battle, as only at the end did the numbers turn in their favour. The necessity of using a Stargate meant that for a few seconds each mothership had to fight alone against such overwhelming odds that their technological advantage was useless.
But with each Milky Way ship that fell, the numerical advantage diminished and the ability to take down a single Ori ship became a more difficult task. Each ship lasted longer and more of its fellows could get past the gauntlet that was exiting the gate, allowing more of the defenders to be taken down.
Of the eight ships that emerged, four immediately broke off and headed towards the other side of the ruined solar system, while four lined up, weathering the remaining fire effortlessly, and took up a stance best described of as a firing line.
"What do you think, would right about now be a good time to kick up Warp storm about Bloodhaven and boot that ship into real space?" Tzintchi asked the other gods.
"You are such a bastard," Asukhon groused.
The Eventide had thought that they were safe about the strange world trapped in interdimensional space, thinking from all the observed data that there was some sort 'Eye of the Storm' effect going on about it. So the sudden turbulence that began to occur caught them off guard.
"We have to stay close if we want to pick up Nanoha and Vita!" Hayate cried out as distorting space-time began to toss the Eventide about.
"We need to revert to normal space before we're stuck, colonel! We'll still be close enough if we remain within the same solar system," the navigator announced as he put in the commands to the computer.
"Do it!" Hayate ordered.
"I think they should arrive… right here," Tzintchi said as he manipulated space and time about the tiny warship.
The sudden appearance of the Eventide just under the firing line of one of the Ori ships as it was firing was a bit of a shock to all parties involved. The beam struck the frigate's shields, splashing off the enormous seal that formed in open space for a second before punching through and clipping the top of the ship. Damage was superficial, but it still scared the crap out of everyone onboard and confused the hell out of the Ori.
"Who the hell are they?" Penderghast asked incredulously while getting his ship out of the way of the next shot. The first one brought against the Prometheus had nearly knocked out their shields, and if it hadn't been for the sudden appearance of this mystery ship their shields probably would have failed completely.
Hiding behind the as of yet undamaged Korolev, the Tau'ri considered their options. They were out of ammo and had no way of actually hurting the Ori ships, but no one wanted to abandon the battle quite yet. For one thing, they were still able to evacuate many Jaffa with their Asgard transporters, and for another they did not want to abandon anyone to the coming slaughter.
The Ori for their part seemed content to figure out what exactly to do, seeing as they were in no real rush. Meanwhile the other four ships began to do something weird in the space where Bloodhaven should have been. The four ships arranged themselves in a square pattern in a potential orbit and then aligned their ships so that each one's main weapon could fire through the rear hoop section of another. As one they all fired.
For a brief second a gigantic loop of energy formed in space, each ship adding to a superconductive cycle until finally a world began to ripple into existence within their ring. The Ori were going to draw Bloodhaven back into a place where they could get at it.
Asukhon fingered the model that represented the Eva on Bloodhaven and grinned in a feral manner, showing off too many teeth. "Not today boys. Not fucking today."
The Prior aboard the unlucky ship only vaguely saw his death coming as it rose out of the atmosphere; a dull grey spear bisected down the middle into two points. During the operation his shields had to remain down, but even if they had been up they would not have protected him from the phasing ability of a copy of the Lance of Longinus. The massive weapon impacted the ship right in the middle and ripped out its engine in a spectacular fire ball. The supercharged beam was also knocked out of alignment and flash vaporized the next ship in the formation before the entire cycle collapsed.
Two of the four ships tasked with cleaning up the remaining Milky Way defenders immediately broke off to assist in finishing the job while the other two decided to ignore the newcomer for the moment. It was small and the Ha'taks could still threaten them a bit if they all focused fire.
Meanwhile, the Ori took advantage of Bloodhaven being partially drawn into real space by deploying swarms of specialized fighter-bombers carrying payloads of ring transporters. Hundreds of them in fact. With the supergate properly oriented, they could beam through thousands of troops a second.
Ali had taken off in flight and Nanoha, joined by Vita in replacement for the now comatose Fate, had followed in an attempt to figure out what was going on. Of the two, Vita was the first to raise the subject when she said, "Where in the hell are we going?"
"Air superiority mission," Ali said simply. "I'm currently the only air mobile unit in our order of battle capable of engaging the enemy. We would really love it if you two helped out though." She then pointed high into the sky where numerous streaks from re-entry fires marked the strange, fragmented sky.
Pausing in her flight, Ali summoned forth an indigo circular seal to act as a firing platform. The sigils present on the flat disc of energy were a bizarre mix of Mid-childa script and other, stranger symbols, along with what appeared to be corruptions of Japanese kanji to Nanoha's eyes.
Pointing her staff, her mother, at the oncoming streaks of fire, Ali's facial expression changed from quietly innocent if somewhat unsettling to excessively enthusiastic. A quartet of smaller seals formed in front of her and bright blue points of light crackling with electricity coalesced at their centres.
"Lightning Flak Assault! Fire!" Ali cried out, and suddenly the four seals began spitting out rapid fire orbs of energy, which proceeded to do as the name suggested and created a wall of flak in the sky where the enemy fighters were incoming. Secondary explosions soon followed.
"What should we do Nanoha?" Vita asked nervously while she watched Ali marching her shots up and down the line of machines.
The question however was answered for them when the enemy began firing on their position and did not seem inclined to distinguish between the three of them.
"Defend ourselves and Ali too. I don't think Fate would be pleased if we stood by," Nanoha said while holding using a Round Shield to protect against the barrage of blue-white energy bolts hurled their way.
In short order pink and red fireworks joined Ali's blue in blowing Ori fighters out of the sky. There were however, far too many of them coming in on two broad a front for the three of them to knock down every one of them and dozens got through to drop their pay loads on the barren ground below.
Taking a quick glance at what had happened Ali then let out a high pitched, psychotic cackle and cried out, "You should have brought bombs!" She then broke away from her fixed position while calling out, "Toji, they're landing troops!"
The response from her scythe was a low pitched chuckle.
Nanoha and Vita shared a significant look at that.
For his part, Toji had brought along a company of his own personal chapter along with a company from each of the two successor chapters, the Bearers and the Reavers. That gave him three hundred marines, a few dozen daemons, an Evangelion, and a couple million plague zombies with which to fight an unknown number of enemy troops with air support.
Toji smiled. Unless the enemy ran right into the zombies that made the fight a massacre rather than a complete and utter curb stomp. Considering that only the Priors or the aircraft had a hope in hell of actually damaging his marines or the daemons, the bastards should have stayed off this world.
He was almost tempted to exclude the Evangelion from combat to make things from getting too one-sided, but he needed it providing cover against precision orbital bombardment, so it would be involved anyway. He would have preferred to just have it knocked the ships out of orbit, but unfortunately the hastily constructed copy of the Lance had not held up against the detonation of the ship it had destroyed.
Cheap Japanese knock-off Toji thought with intentional perverse irony.
The first order of business would be to prevent the solidification of the enemy's lines by disrupting their staging area. There were two forces especially well suited to that: the Terminators from his Sons, and the assault squads from the Reavers. They had the speed to get in close before the enemy could formulate a defensive line, and the hitting power to prevent them from doing so.
Toji was so glad he had decided to wear his Terminator armour today.
Clamping down his helmet to secure him from the corrosive effects of the Warp, Toji ordered in a somewhat metallic voice, "All right boys, we're fighting guys more fanatically than us. Let's go teach them whose gods are stronger!"
That got a laugh from his men right before he activated the teleporters. There was a brief discontinuity as they were hurled through the Warp, but then with a bang of displacing air they appeared in the midst of the Ori staging area as hundreds of men in battle armour were pouring out of dozens of ring transporters every second. They were given a brief look at the war gods in their midst before the shooting started.
Storm bolters, heavy flamers, reaper autocannons, and assault cannons all combined together in an instant to create a circle of death where the Ori troops simply ceased to exist as men and began to exist as a fine mist of blood and ash.
Meanwhile, nearly across the horizon the Reavers began their assault, loading up into what was quite possibly the most insane device ever devised by man. Shortly after their founding, the Reavers had asked the question, "How do you do a drop pod assault without a ship in orbit?"
The result had been to build a mobile double barrelled rail launcher capable of hurling two marines at a time almost ten kilometres through the air before they fired their jet packs to slow down to a safe speed and land on top of their enemies. Even more insane, they had already scrapped the first production run in favour of a magazine type system and specialized capacitors that allowed them to -with proper preparation- put an entire squad into the air in about five seconds.
The Reavers had brought four of these monstrosities against common sense.
Of course, the only reason that they actually survived the acceleration involved was because their armour incorporated gravity and inertial dampers based off of Eldar flip belts, along with several other tricks.
While the Ori soldiers in the middle of the formation ran and screamed from the unholy, invulnerable beasts that had suddenly appeared in their midst, the ones on the outskirts only warning as to the doom falling upon them was the sound of jet engines firing and the whirring of chainsaws.
Oh, and of course the screams of "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!"
Hayate had watched in horror at the battle around her and had made her decision. With the dimensional dislocation going on, they could not escape to interdimensional space, and when stranded in the middle of a fight with no way to escape, her only options were to pick a side or do nothing at all and hope no one shot at the Eventide.
On the one side, she had the hoop ships, who while she was willing to give the benefit of the doubt for damaging her ship due to her rather unexpected arrival, she had witnessed them destroying ships unable to do anything to them. On the other side, she had seen strange, pyramid shaped ships firing at the hoop ships, and blockier ships actively catching shots from their less well defended allies. Those ships weren't even fighting back, just covering the retreat of the others.
Hayate had been given the key in her hand for a reason. That reason was to defend her ship, not to start wars. But she had a feeling that once these hoop ships finished off the others, they would come for her. She would make sure that they would not have that chance.
"Activate the Arc-en-Ceil. Target the hoop ships to prevent the destruction of the other side," Hayate ordered as she inserted the activation key.
Outside, ahead of the pronged bow of the Eventide, large magical containment rings began to form, designed to channel the destructive power about to be unleashed in a focused manner.
One of the hoop ships paused in its targeting of one of the few remaining pyramid ships to consider the Eventide. The targeting of the Arc-en-Ceil had left the frigate pointed slightly between and below the plane of both of the ships, so a direct attack was ruled out. In fact, with the positioning of the containment rings, if they did not understand the magical technology at work they may very well have thought that the TSAB vessel was attempting to engage some form of propulsion.
Eventually the ship decided that they did not want them to finish whatever it was that they were doing, even if it was just escape, and began to orient to bring its main gun to bear on them. That solidified Hayate's assessment in her mind and she turned the key.
The Eventide fired and a point in space simply buckled and folded in on itself. The distortions rushed out at the speed of light before tapering off a hundred kilometres from the epicentre. Matter was torn apart atom by atom, and the two Ori motherships simply stopped existing, reduced to a cloud of cold free atoms scattered about the remnants of this dead star system, to in time be consumed by the artificially created black hole powering the supergate.
As for the supergate, it abruptly shut off, the disruption of local space-time automatically tripping the safety overrides.
Every ship paused and gaped in horror and awe at what that little ship had just done. Across the system the remaining Ori ships ceased their action to draw Bloodhaven further into real space and instead turned as one to take care of this new and unexpectedly dangerous threat.
"We won't be able to recharge before they get here," one of the bridge techs reported. "And all of the ships are staying at least two hundred kilometres apart. A single shot from one of their guns will overwhelm our shields."
"But not theirs," Hayate noted with pride and awe as the battered defenders took up station about the Eventide, ready to defend them with their lives. They did not even have compatible communications protocols, and yet these people would protect them.
"Interesting…" Tzintchi stated while he let the Warp storm dissipate as quickly as it had begun. A star ship sized distortion cannon. He would have to ask the engineers about that one.
"Colonel! The dislocation is clearing up!" The sensor officer reported, surprised at the shortness of such an intense event.
"Begin charging the engines. I want us out of here as quickly as possible!" Hayate ordered. "I also want Nanoha and Vita back on board at the first opportunity."
The entire character of the battle changed for Nanoha the moment that Ali took a glancing hit from one of the fighter-bomber's cannons. It was a very slight hit that was mostly absorbed by her magic, but Ali had clearly taken some damage. But instead of crying out in pain, Ali had snarled in a fashion very out of place for a young girl. What she had then done had cemented the niggling feeling that what was going on was not right. The ground fighting had been brutal, but Nanoha was not adverse to lethal force and she understood that in war people died. She didn't like it, but the fact that the people that Ali was working with were killing others did not disturb her.
What Ali did however scared the living fuck out of Nanoha.
Taking off in pursuit of the exact craft that had wounded her, Ali caught up with it and plunged her scythe into the front, peeling it open like a tin can to reveal the pilot inside and then causing him to tumble out of his rapidly disintegrating craft. Ali pursued him as he fell flailing and screaming from the sky, letting him look at the ground for a while before she buried her blade in his gut and then stopped, leaving him suspended from her scythe like a worm on a hook.
She then cried out, "Soul Stealer!" and a set of ugly sigils appeared around her right hand. Cackling loudly she shoved her hand in the struggling man's chest and ripped out his heart. But that was not all she pulled out, for even as she ripped her scythe out of the now dead body and let the two halves tumble to the ground, a faint blue, transparent outline of the man remained, centred about the still beating heart in Ali's hand.
She then bit down into the heart like an apple, squirting blood all over her pale face while the outline screamed in psychic agony and dissolved.
Nanoha and Vita watched all of this in mute, wide eyed horror while Nanoha clutched her chest in memory of eleven years ago when Shamal had stuck her hand through her chest to drain her Linker Core.
It was Vita who screamed out, "WHAT THE HELL DID YOU JUST DO!"
Turning and looking at them in innocent confusion despite the still hot blood sticking to her face and hair, Ali then said, "Battlefield medicine. I ate his soul, and its energy healed me up. See?" She then pointed to the area where she had been hit and indeed she was healed.
"You're insane!" Vita cried out.
"Why would you do something like that?" Nanoha asked in confusion.
"Because I can," Ali replied with a shrug. "Now we have a battle to get back to."
"I don't think so! I suddenly wonder if maybe the people you are fighting aren't the good guys here!" Nanoha announced.
Ali paused and then bared her scythe menacingly, flicking off some of the blood before saying, "You're Fate's friend, and you shouldn't be saying things like that. You should be with us."
"Ali, do not push the issue, they do not have all the facts," Precia warned.
"No momma! No one stands aside, no one does nothing! Everyone acts! That's Chaos! That's who we are. Now pick a side!" Ali shouted out angrily before moving her scythe into a ready position.
"You killed a man and ate his soul! We can't be allied with anyone who does something like that!" Nanoha replied while she and Vita took up their own guard stances.
"Then die!" Ali cried out, launching at them.
"With the charge time for their weapon, those people won't be able to get off another successful shot, especially now that the Ori know what to look for," Carter pointed out.
"So far they've saved two Lucian Alliance and three Free Jaffa Ha'taks, and the Korolev. I think that deserves a little more of our time," Penderghast stated. So far only the Prometheus and the Odyssey remained, the other ships having already escaped to hyperspace once their battered drives were ready. If the other ships had not been given the breathing time from the destruction of the two ships and the shut down of the supergate, it was doubtful they would have escaped.
"Sir, the supergate is powering up again!" The sensor officer shouted out over the sound of the damage control crews suppressing fires on the bridge.
The four motherships remaining almost immediately turned back around to the planet they were working on getting back into real space.
"I've got a bad feeling that we're about to meet something we won't like," Mitchell muttered.
Just barely clearing the bounds set by the supergate, this latest monstrosity was a good two or three times more massive than the other ships and significantly more solid, not having the large space wasting hoop at the back. Its main gun looked capable of one shot killing one of the smaller Ori ships.
"Always with the super weapons," Daniel muttered.
"Okay, valour and honour are all well and good, but we can't do anything against that. Helm, get us out of here," Penderghast ordered.
On a somewhat more optimistic note at least the last thing they saw before leaping to hyperspace away from that monster was the unknown ship making a similar get away.
The fight in the air above Bloodhaven had turned into a three way brawl between the Ori fighters, the TSAB 'diplomats', and Ali. By far the Ori were taking the worst of it, as whenever they tried to take pot shots at the either of the other two sides they kept getting turned into atomic vapour.
And while Ali had plenty of raw power and tricks that no one from the TSAB had ever seen before, she was unfortunately outnumbered and ultimately outgunned. Against either Nanoha or Vita she might have been able to force a draw, but with both of them she was slowly being worn away. Worse yet, the cartridge system was something she could not counter.
So Ali changed the conditions of the scenario. She dived down out of the sky, breaking the sound barrier during the fall before abruptly flattening off, skimming about two metres above the ground in the middle of the slaughter occurring below as three hundred space marines tore through thousands of Ori soldiers. Not missing an opportunity, Ali let her scythe reap a grim harvest through the ranks of those who followed Origin, slowing down slightly until she stopped above a cluster of particularly gigantic marines, one of them squeezing an old man in his enormous fist until marrow squirted out of his bones.
Vita, being the close-combat specialist, was the one who fell into the trap while Nanoha could only watch on from a distance.
Ali threw out a hand and cried out, "Banshee Wail!" which caused an enormous outburst of sound and light that caught Vita completely off guard, blinding her senses.
The marines beneath her were not so affected though, their helmets and sensor suites quite handily filtering out the interference.
A single shot range out.
Graf Eisen hit the ground and skittered away while the one who had taken the shot caught the nearly bisected body with his enormous gauntleted hand, being careful not to crush the tiny frame.
"She lives!" Toji cried out to Nanoha. "I know not why, but she does… at my whim! Go, retreat from this place before your presence makes me change my mind!"
Tears running down her face, Nanoha began to line up a head shot on the giant, but he simply moved his hand so that one of the troops could point a massive flamethrower at Vita's unconscious body.
"Do you think you can kill both of us without killing your comrade?" Toji asked. "If you leave, she will get medical attention. If you stay, we can wait right here until she bleeds out. Your choice."
Nanoha hesitated and then ran.
"Thank you Toji, but are we really going to help here?" Ali asked with a sour look on her face. "She is our enemy."
"You have much to learn little one. Especially one how to corrupt people," Toji said before surveying the battlefield. The sky had been completely broken apart now, the dull red provided by the Warp replaced with a starlit sky faintly illuminated by the ring around the planet.
The ring transporters had gone silent, and Toji chuckled. "Clever, but not effective enough. Status report, how quickly can we get our forces within a one kilometre radius?"
Listening to his communication network, Toji smiled and said, "Perfect. Evangelion, I request you come to this location immediately. We're getting out of here."
"What? How?" Ali asked.
"A little trick we learned from one of the Angels. We can't go very far, but fortunately the gods had enough foresight to establish a base within range of this move," Toji said as the forces under his command assembled as he had ordered, especially the gigantic Eva.
Once he was satisfied they had everything they could recover, he said, "Commence Operation Leliel."
In orbit the massive Ori dreadnought took up position in orbit above the battlefield, its main gun charging up to full power; superconducting rings about the primary emitter glowing white with the barely contained energy. Bloodhaven would trouble the Ori no more.
The dreadnought fired a massive lance of energy that stabbed down into Bloodhaven and immediately boiled off the atmosphere where it struck. The rock beneath the beam went from solid to liquid to gas to plasma in a few thousand seconds and immediately expanded outward in a massive pressure explosion that ripped up a continent sized hole. Still the dreadnought continued to fire, boring down towards the core. It did not make it before the capacitors gave out, but it did punch a hole thirty-five kilometres deep and five kilometres wide, although the eventual final crater would be much wider and shallower. Already the tectonic plates of the world were collapsing inward, ripping the surface of the world apart while ejecta from the blast and the sudden surge in volcanic activity was already darkening the skies.
The Ori let up their attack and settled into a brooding orbit about the star they had killed, not making much of a deal even when Bloodhaven once more sank into the Warp. They did not care. The planet was dead as it could be without detonating a ZPM on its surface.
Or so they thought.