37. A Warm Welcome
The area around the vast superdimensional barrier known as the Great Wall was called 'Wild Space' by the Time-Space Administration Bureau's navigators for a very good reason. The dimensional currents there were treacherous and unpredictable, capable of whipping up storms that could blind their most sophisticated sensors and crush ships-of-the-line like insects. Time flowed differently there, voyages taking seconds or weeks whilst hours passed in realspace. It was a den of pirates, smugglers, and far stranger and more horrifying things, a savage, uncivilised frontier set apart from the peace and order of Bureau-supervised space.
The forces of Chaos called it the Doldrums.
The Conqueror cruised through dimensional space with terrible majesty, its Geller field not so much deflecting the folds and disturbances in the continuum as shunting straight through them. It was a Zeruel-class heavy cruiser, four kilometres long and of the standard design for Chaos's new, mass-produced warships. It resembled a curious hybrid between a cathedral tower and an ironclad of old, lined with hundreds of turrets and other weapons systems offering coverage in almost every direction. At one end was the heavily-armoured, beaklike prow, and at the other, the rearmost kilometre bulged outwards to contain the bridge, main engines, and a good portion of the support systems.
It would have been quite obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that this vessel was not intended for friendly purposes, but as ever, Chaos's shipwrights had gone the extra mile. The spikes studding the hull were adorned with human bones (clone-grown, as placeholders until the ship managed to acquire some of the genuine articles in combat), the most unsettling and eye-hurting runes of the gods had been engraved tens of metres high into the armour, and the turrets' muzzles were adorned with daemonic maws that growled and snapped mindlessly into the empty darkness of space. The disturbingly ornate frescoes covering the unspiked, unturreted parts of the hull, though, were entirely standard-issue – the only difference from those on a civilian vessel was that the acts depicted therein did not look quite as mutually-consensual. When your top naval architects spent most of their free time staring into the Warp and giggling, there were some things that you simply had to accept as inevitable.
Admiral Rong-Arya had a model of it as part of her collection. It was amazing how much detail they'd been able to fit in – with a microscope of appropriate magnification, you could even see the thing with the daemon, the banana, and the flock of very surprised sheep just underneath the Deck Seventeen disintegrator battery. Needless to say, she had never let Cassandra near it or any of her other models – it wasn't that she was worried about 'corrupting the child's mind' or something similarly idiotic, but rather that little girls and fragile, delicate objects did not mix.
As if on cue, her daughter looked up from where she was perched on the arm of the Conqueror's command throne, pouting in boredom. "Are we there yet, Mama? You promised we'd be having a battle today. You promised."
Rong-Arya smiled at her, gently braiding her hair with her clawed hands. "One moment, honey, we're almost there. Mama just has to finalise the preparations. Commander, are the void shields up?"
"For the third time, yes," Commander Ichiro-Faust, her executive officer, growled. "Not only that, but the S2 engines are running clean and sweet, the fusion reactors are barely being taxed, and the Geller field's the stablest I've ever seen it... again, as I have mentioned several times already. Look, ma'am, I know you're worried about it, but we're not going to have a repeat of the business with the Cylons, all right?"
"Sorry, commander. You know how it is. Just let me know when we're in range, will you?"
"Of course, ma'am."
Rong-Arya and Ichiro-Faust were, if not the last of a dying breed yet, certainly the products of a very limited-edition run. Prior to (and even after) warp-based cloning and time-distortion becoming viable, manpower and resources had been at an absolute premium for the survivors of Third Impact. This had fostered a very particular philosophy in them – the limitless power of the Warp would not be used to produce more, so much as to make every unit they did produce as perfect as possible. Post-scarcity economics were not easy things to grasp. Their first dedicated warship, the Stiletto, was essentially a test-bed for every advanced technology they could muster – including more than a few that turned out to be mutually contradictory in their effects – and so it only made sense that the crew would have similar attention lavished upon them.
Every member of the crew was augmented, whether via cybernetics, mutation, or even stranger means, but the senior officers had received the lion's share. With the advent of ascended daemons, death was not the end – or, at least, it wasn't the end for anyone who had died before Third Impact. As such, the gods had an extraordinary amount of accumulated knowledge to draw upon... provided they could get the owners of that knowledge persistent realspace anchors so that they could share it with everyone else. It had been Mislaato who suggested the solution – possession. The new generation of officers would have their minds and bodies melded with those of ascended geniuses from across history, allowing the ultimate marriage of youthful vigour and ancient cunning.
At least, that was the plan. The reality, naturally, ended up being somewhat different.
The possession process was complex, time-consuming, and prone to spectacular failure, with the slightest accident or mistake resulting in a severe case of split personality at best, or irreplaceable personnel, whether human or ascended, having their minds irreparably damaged or even destroyed at worst. Nevertheless, as with the Divine Assassins and Space Marines, that would have been acceptable so long as the end results returned the investment. To cut a long story short, they didn't.
Astonishingly, the various conservative, cranky old men brought back to serve their species once more turned out not to have much to say about models of warfare and society involving sorcery, space combat, and physics-warping, building-sized cyborgs... assuming that they survived the culture shock at all. One of the ascended, a rather shy German scientist, had gone catatonic after looking at the inside of a super-solenoid engine, though given that he had not been heard from since, there was also the possibility that the discrepancy between his stated political views and the ideals that the gods championed might have had something to do with it. With all the ascensions going on, there was often something of a time-lag between someone being brought back and the powers-that-be actually reading their biography.
Rong-Arya, meanwhile, was one of the program's most successful products. Her components – a quiet young psyker who had received a new lease on life after being plucked by Chaos's recruiters from the bombed-out urban battlegrounds of Shanghai, and an elderly, charismatic warlord who had been rewarded by the gods with daemonhood for his collaboration during the post-Third Impact consolidation – got on very well with each other, allowing a mostly-flawless meld, and their shared knowledge and talents were, relatively speaking, quite relevant to humanity's current situation. Even so, she was far from infallible.
Arya Prayang had been an excellent general in life – forging a small, peaceful-ish empire out of the ruins of a subcontinent was more than enough evidence of that – but that did not necessarily translate well to combat on an interstellar scale. Furthermore, the technological might of the Stiletto made it far too easy to get overconfident – after curb-stomping the first two galactic superpowers, delusions of invincibility were pretty much inevitable. It was for this reason that after a bad jump left them crippled and lost without shields, weapons, or even motive power, the first thing they ended up doing was picking a fight with a bunch of mechanised religious fanatics.
On paper, the Cylons should have been pushovers. Primitive electronic warfare suites, nothing even resembling shields, and weaponry consisting of bog-standard guns and missiles did not an intimidating foe make. Unfortunately, some of those missiles were tipped with rather large nuclear warheads, and so it was that Rong-Arya and the crew of the Stiletto learned two important lessons. First, that if the future from which you are borrowing most of your technology has directed fusion weaponry as its gold standard in anti-armour work, the undirected, planet-depopulating variant is probably going to hurt. Second, and relatedly, that void shields are really, really important.
Eventually, the (even more primitive, and badly battered) refugees that the artificials had been chasing had had to bail the Stiletto out, leaving a bitter taste in Rong-Arya's mouth that not even blasting the Cylon fleet into atoms once everything was back online had managed to remove. She had the powers of the Warp, an invincible warship, and two brilliant tactical minds at her disposal, and she had still managed to screw up.
In the end, the death-knell of the officer possession scheme had been sounded a month after the Stiletto began its maiden voyage, when a Prussian ascended with an affinity for fancy helmets and the supernatural ability to grow luxuriant moustaches regardless of whose body he was occupying managed to formulate a worryingly plausible plan for taking over the divinely-appointed government from the inside. Needless to say, the gods did not take kindly to this, and since it came so close behind the business with the scientist, placed a temporary moratorium on Germans getting ascended... until they found out about the French diplomat, the Italian banker, and the Turkish dictator who had also been involved. There were occasional rumours about restarting the project using mindless clones as daemonhosts, but it wasn't exactly a high-priority endeavour.
As a result, the possessed officers, like the Stiletto itself, were something of a relic in Chaos's ever-advancing war machine. Whereas the latter was a museum piece and object of research these days, though, their gods still had work for the former – the illustrious Captain Rong-Arya, the only one of their ship commanders to see actual combat, in particular.
Initially, she had thought that she might face censure for her actions – most of the Stiletto's 'explorations' had in fact consisted of cutting a swathe of fire and death across various unsuspecting interstellar civilisations of wildly disparate influence and morality, and whilst that had undoubtedly been satisfying, and had usually seemed like a good idea at the time, she didn't really see how it helped them bolster their defences against the C'tan. Instead, quite the opposite had happened. The gods had praised her for her efforts, promoted her to a rank befitting fleet command, and assigned her to deal with the border skirmishes cropping up around the Bloodhaven gate. Apparently, quite a few people were upset with them. She couldn't imagine why.
Most of the Stiletto's crew had gone their separate ways after they returned home, either returning to civilian life to live off their fat pensions, or sticking with the military in the hope of getting a prestigious position elsewhere. The exception was Ichiro-Faust, her former tactical officer, who had even refused a promotion to keep working with her. It was a decision that had surprised and flattered her – the other daemonhost was a good officer, and it was always nice to have a familiar face around on the long, boring frontier patrols she expected to see so many of in the near-future. One relocation from tactical to executive later, and she had the perfect second-in-command to help her weather whatever awaited her outside the Great Wall.
Even if she didn't fully understand why the gods were so pleased with her, the reason her help was needed at the border was much more immediately apparent. The commanders there were still unused to the fact that they were up against enemies who could actually hurt them, and this new civilisation, the so-called 'Bureau', was exploiting it for all they were worth. They had even had several ships captured rather than destroyed, including one containing an entire company from the Space Marine chapter known as the Heralds of Tzintchi, and even the God of Ambition himself wasn't entirely sure that all of them had managed to activate their suicide protocols in time. Needless to say, that was when everyone started doing their best headless-chicken impersonations.
Once the most incompetent officers had been weeded out and dealt with in a manner deemed appropriately gruesome, Rong-Arya went to work at restoring the fleet's shattered confidence with her usual brisk efficiency. Patrol routes were tightened up and listening posts relocated, drawing on her own experience of dodging through the Alpha Quadrant to strike far behind enemy lines without warning. Combat logs were carefully assessed to formulate new tactics and new weapons to counter the enemy, flavoured with the new admiral's own knowledge of what worked and what didn't in space combat. Even if she couldn't promise invincibility, she could at least get them damned close.
It had worked. The fleet's survival rate steadily improved, as did their facility at scoring kills, gathering information, and even taking prisoners, who were treated to yet another facet of the lessons Rong-Arya learned in the Alpha Quadrant... often at length, and in front of their comrades. The skirmishes developed into a war of information, each side trying to obtain as much knowledge as possible about the enemy as possible whilst yielding as little as possible of their own, and whilst the forces of Chaos were still not gaining as much as the admiral might have liked, they weren't losing much any more, either. Even so, training and strategy could only take one so far. The true measure of a commander, she believed, was in how they reacted to the opportunities presented to them.
It was an anonymous, untraceable data-package which none of their agents claimed responsibility for, and which none of their interrogations had unearthed. That was immediately suspicious, but the information it contained managed to explain a lot of minor inconsistencies in the intel they had received thus far, whilst also being far too tempting to ignore. The TSAB forces would be receiving a new commander, and they knew where the changeover would be taking place.
Though this was obviously an excellent way to learn more of the enemy's secrets and throw their fleet into anarchy, Rong-Arya saw more in it than that. Capturing this new commander and anyone else of importance at the changeover would be an unrivalled opportunity to demonstrate the might of Chaos against the best the weaklings of the Bureau had to offer. As such, she had elected to lead the assault personally, taking along one of the fleet's newest and most advanced ships-of the line, as well as escorts blessed by all four gods and crewed by the most elite devotees she could muster at short notice. In truth, she would have preferred to use her own flagship, the colossal battleship New Syracuse, but as magnificent as it undoubtedly was, it was a bit too big and slow for this sort of mission. Blitzkrieg raids like this required a more subtle, delicate touch, and the Conqueror's four kilometres of laser-spewing death would do nicely.
"Sensors are picking up energy readings matching Bureau warships ahead," Ichiro-Faust reported. "Fifteen signatures, and at least two of them are probably big enough to be their equivalent of ships-of-the-line. Looks like that intel was right on the money. Ready to start the party when you give the word, ma'am."
"Roger that, commander. Lieutenant Monza, signal the Argus. It's time to call the storms."
Their pet mage simply nodded, setting his facial tubes to jangling like nightmare wind-chimes as his sibilant voice echoed through her mind. Aye, ma'am. Nice weather for it, isn't it?
Of the captured Bureau personnel, Lieutenant Florio Monza was one of Rong-Arya's most successful projects – a loyal follower and a gold-mine of information who had taken to Chaos's prototypical blend of warp-sorcery and Mid-Childan magic like the proverbial duck to water. The fact that his brain appeared to operate at right-angles to reality was an irritant, but something of an inevitability given the admiral's preferred recruitment methods, and with the sheer number of sorcerers roped into the Bloodhaven project, she had to make do with what she had.
His eyes, mouth, and nose were gone, replaced by a series of ribbed, articulated metal tubes protruding from his face. They were connected to a bizarre, gently pulsating melange of organic and artificial components fused to his chest, its weight giving him a permanently hunched-over stance. One hand had been extensively mutated, forming a lobster-like claw that he clicked at the air at odd intervals, as if to a rhythm only he could hear. He still wore the tattered remains of his TSAB Navy uniform for some reason, the rank insignia of Chaos's armed forces crudely sewn onto the shoulders. All this meant that when compared to the rest of the Conqueror's bridge crew, he averaged out as somewhere between 'presentable' and 'moderately handsome'.
The gods had never made a decree against fraternisation on their warships. Funnily enough, it had never been much of a problem.
Outside the bridge's viewports, the gentle undulations of the Doldrums' endless colours began to become more rapid and agitated, the dimensional sea expressing its disquiet as the thousands of psychic clones wired into their Arael-class support frigate, the Argus, did their work.
"The Geller field's starting to come under strain," one of the tech-priests reported. "Shall we divert power from the fusion reactors?"
"Negative, Engineering. This ship was built to handle far worse than this. Think we've blinded them yet, Monza?"
I can feel their eyes on me. Staring. A little more. A little more, yes. I like what you've done with your hair, ma'am. Suits you.
The hellfire dancing in Rong-Arya's eyes flickered as she stared at him in bewilderment. "I'll take that as a 'no', then. Commander, have the escorts take up their positions when the fields are at forty per cent capacity. At sixty per cent, we begin the operation."
"Roger that, ma'am." Ichiro-Faust's anticipatory grin revealed row upon row of shark-like teeth.
According to the gods' received memories, summoning warp-storms to disrupt the enemy's movements and conceal one's own was a long-established tactic for the Old Gods' forces in the forty-first millennium. The fact that the soft, lazy civilisations outside the Great Wall lacked sufficient protection on their ships to weather even a mild storm only made it even more effective. The Bureau fleet was trapped in realspace, with no idea of what was coming for them.
Tension crackled like lightning through the high, vaulted room, the gargoyles in the corners twitching with bloodlust. Cassandra plopped down onto her adoptive mother's lap, bouncing up and down excitedly. Rong-Arya studied her fondly with one eye, whilst monitoring the Geller field capacitor gauge projected by her throne with the other. She wished she'd had 'bring your kids to work' days this fun in her two past lives.
"Escorts are standing by, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust stated at last. "Sensors crew say they're detecting movement from the Bureau ships – think they've figured out something's up."
Damn. "You mean they can see us?"
"Wouldn't go that far. They're arranging themselves into a sphere formation – decent all-around coverage, but no particular focus on our planned angles of attack. Think the sudden warp-storm spooked 'em, is all."
"Understood. The operation will go ahead as planned. The Temptress and Argus have the green light – it's time to show these weaklings how a war is really fought. Hail Lord Tzintchi!"
The bridge crew's answering roar was almost deafening.
From the Conqueror's perspective, the two frigates appeared to attack the enemy fleet from above and behind, one from the left, one from the right. Sending the support vessels in first was an unusual strategy, but the Argus's psyker relays and the Temptress's daemonic choirs would throw the already-confused Bureau forces into further disarray to envelop the two frigates. Besides, it wasn't as if heavily-armed, kilometre-long warships needed much babysitting.
Three enemy signatures vanished from the holographic display in a matter of seconds, destroyed before they could even react to the attackers emerging from the Warp. The sphere disintegrated, ships swarming outwards to envelop the frigates with their usual disconcerting speed. They had taken the bait.
"Skulltaker, Virulence, move in."
The next two frigates appeared from behind and below, their weapons hammering into the enemy's rear. One more signature disappeared, followed by another as the four Chaos warships began to coordinate their fire to devastating effect. On the admiral's lap, Cassandra squealed in delight. The battle had truly begun.
Though the sheer distances involved in space combat meant that Rong-Arya couldn't have seen the rest of their squadron even if the Conqueror were in realspace along with them, she could nevertheless picture them in her mind's eye. The Argus, less a ship than an idea of a ship, a skeletal array of metal and stone held together with blazing, sorcerous fire that discharged sheets of crawling warp-lightning into the enemy. The Temptress, its lavishly-decorated hull gleaming in the distant starlight as it whispered in the mages' minds with a thousand seductive voices. The Virulence, glistening nests like boils on its back disgorging wave after wave of festering, black-winged daemons. The Skulltaker, ludicrously oversized weapons blazing away from every square metre unadorned with elaborate trophy racks.
She had models of them, too. The Argus's one was especially fiddly.
A pattern began to assert itself amongst the frantic manoeuvring of the battle, and Rong-Arya smiled savagely. The Bureau fleet had realised they were at a disadvantage, attempting to use their superior speed to slip away from the four escorts whilst their heavier vessels mounted a valiant rearguard action. Unfortunately, thanks to her careful calculation of the angles of attack and patterns of fire, only one escape route remained... and the Conqueror was sat right in its way, hidden in the Warp.
From far below the engraved iron deck, the gentle, ever-present hum of the fusion reactors steadily rose in pitch and volume. Gauges spiked across the holographic display as the massive cruiser's weapons powered up, and lights blinked into existence as torpedo after torpedo was loaded into the forward tubes. She saw ethereal flames lap across the hull through the view-ports as a burning vortex of light emerged in front of the prow, the sure sign of an impending realspace transition.
"Stage Three is commencing," Admiral Rong-Arya said to the silent bridge, savouring every word. "Prepare to engage Task Force Harlaown."
Author's Notes: Well, I've made quite enough references to the Stiletto by now – only fair that its commander makes an appearance.
Readers of The Open Door will note that Rong-Arya's encounter with the Cylons went rather differently here than in that fic. There, the USS Mary S- sorry, the Stiletto shrugged off a nuclear bombardment designed to wipe out an entire planet's human population with barely a scratch to its paintwork despite being completely devoid of adequate protection, before effortlessly owning its assailants. The reasons for the change should be self-explanatory.
