49. Space Oddity
"This is Rear Admiral Keith-Azrael. Our fleet is approaching the contacts headed for Earth, and our scouts will be within range to perform a detailed sensor sweep within six minutes. Out."
Then they've already engaged, Toji thought.
After the disaster with the embedded spy network, Bloodhaven's defenders had tacitly agreed not to use the standard telepathic messenger ritual for long-distance communications. There was no way of knowing how badly the system had been compromised, and they didn't want to find out. He'd heard from the tech-priests that the gods were working on a new, more watertight alternative, but it would take a while for them to iron out the creases. Apparently, the Entity breaching their security had been as much of a shock to them as it had been to their devotees, which he couldn't help but find perversely satisfying.
In the meantime, Bloodhaven had to do things the primitive, old-fashioned technological way, and that meant that every message they received from the interception fleet came at a fifteen-minute delay. Their link to Keith-Azrael was less a two-way communication, and more an after-action report.
He turned to the row of sensor consoles to the left of his command throne. "How're they looking out there, magos?"
Pedro Diaz kept staring at his screen, the shifting colours gleaming off his flat red lenses. "Sorry, sir. Hard to tell with all this interference. I'll let you know if we get something."
"Do so."
It wasn't just communications difficulties that made time relevant to this mission. The enemy ships were, on average, faster than Chaos vessels in the Warp, so the interception fleet had a very limited opportunity to catch their quarry before they happily trundled past towards Earth. Fortunately, this increased speed came at the expense of safety – ships from outside the Great Wall were less well-adapted to the turbulent, unpredictable seas within, and so a good, hefty Warp-storm would slow them down to a crawl in addition to blinding them to approaching vessels. The gods, never ones to underachieve, had cheerfully provided, and now the enemy were stuck in the middle of the largest Warp-storm of the past three millennia. This posed something of a problem as well, though – once they entered the storm, it was nearly as hard for Carmine Hollow to detect its own fleet as it would hopefully be for their adversaries.
Keith-Azrael appeared on the screen again, a pallid, scrawny young man with the dully glowing eyes that would have betrayed him as a daemonhost even if the double-barrelled name hadn't been enough of a clue. Prior to the operation, Toji had not even heard of him outside the usual lists of disembodied names on the occasional report, but apparently he'd been quite an asset during the border skirmishes between Rong-Arya's fleet and the TSAB. The admiral had said he had two of the finest military minds she'd ever encountered. Privately, Toji hoped she wasn't just letting her own biases get in the way, but since he had less experience in space combat than either of them, it seemed only polite to support her choice.
"Three minutes out now. Not much yet – let Lord Tzintchi know he did a real number on the Warp around here, by the way – but I'm going to put you through to our scouts anyway. The ghosts and echoes out here are painting a pretty interesting picture."
The screen blanked out, switching to static. The tech-priest operating it swore, and dived into the mass of cabling under the table. A moment later, a different voice started speaking.
"Captain Gupta, Retribution of Delhi. Like the rear admiral said, we're still a bit out of range, but what readings we have got are quite unsettling. The gravimetrics are picking something up, sirs, and anything big enough to have a detectable gravitic field at this distance is some way outside our pay grade. We're still advancing, but I've given the order to retreat at the first sign of trouble. From there, it's up to wiser minds than mine."
Toji gestured to his naval commander. "Opinions, admiral?"
Rong-Arya had been watching the screen in silence for the past quarter-hour, seemingly impassive as the reports came tricking in... unless one noticed that she'd gone through two packets of cigarettes by now, and was starting on her third.
The daemonhost exhaled, the smoke forming into disquieting shapes before fleeing to the corners of the room. "Well, it's a superweapon, obviously. None of their regular ships have nearly the mass required for that. The question is, what kind? Lot of universes, lot of different ways to hurt people. Worst-case scenario, it's the Chouginga Dai-Gurren, the Spiral Nation's flagship. That's damned unlikely – it's supposed to take them months more to fix it, if they can at all – but if there's one guiding rule about the Spirals, it's that underestimating them is a really dumb idea. Along with the Integrated Data Entity, they're the heaviest hitters in the coalition... and that's being kind to the Entity."
"Fair enough. Diaz, have someone call Earth. The gods will need to know about this, if they don't already."
"Roger that, sir... wait, hold on a minute. Oh, that's not good. That is not good at all."
"What isn't?" Rong-Arya was next to him, cigarette in hand. Toji hadn't even seen her cross the room.
"Massive energy spike thirty seconds ago, right in the middle of the Warp-storm. Whited out our sensors – I'm trying to find our fleet or theirs, but I can't see anything. We've lost them."
Not again. Please, not again... "Keep looking, and run a detailed analysis on the readings while you're at it. 'Massive energy spike' doesn't tell us much."
"On it, sir."
The terminal crackled again, and Gupta's voice came through. "Thirty seconds to contact, sirs. I'm sending the visual feed over now."
A slowly-moving image appeared on the screen, showing what almost looked like a stormy sky, save for the ever-changing colours and the unsettling way the towering, planet-engulfing 'clouds' moved. The feed was filtered, obviously – no mortal could look at the raw Warp and retain their sanity, and even daemons didn't have a solid guarantee.
The image panned out, showing the scouting force as a whole, their gleaming, bubble-like Geller fields shielding them against the Warp. All of them, even the two-and-a-half-kilometre Retribution, seemed tiny, toylike, against the terrible majesty of the empyrean void.
The seconds crawled by – ten, then twenty, then thirty. The 'camera' (actually a psychic feed from a scout-daemon) zoomed in occasionally on what inevitably turned out to be an oddly-shaped cloud, will o' the wisp, or other trick of the Warp. Given the distances involved in space combat and the resolution of Operations' screen, Toji wasn't sure they'd even be able to see the enemy when they showed up.
"Come on," Rong-Arya muttered. "Where are you?"
An alarm blared, and it took a moment for Toji to realise it was coming from the terminal.
"Captain, the gravimetric sensors just spiked!" a nameless voice yelled. "Bearing three-three seven high, distance of five hundred kilometres – Warp's teeth, they're right on top of us!"
"All hands, red alert!" That was Gupta, almost succeeding in masking the tremor in his voice. "Patel, do we have anything?"
"Not yet, I- oh gods."
The clouds ahead of the scouts parted, and Toji saw something that would live on in his dreams for a long, long time.
It was a wall of dark grey metal, impossibly long and of sanity-defying height. Tiny, near-invisible dots of light flecked its surface, each belonging to a porthole that would have dwarfed skyscrapers. At the rear were two sleek, drill-tipped engine nacelles, each as long as the Japanese archipelago, and on its prow was a face. A colossal, stylised human face.
The burning green pits of flame that were its eyes could have held cities. Its wedge of a nose was a sloping, angular mountain, thrice Everest's height and many times its mass. The largest ship in the Chaos fleet could have threaded its way through the canyon that was its long, closed mouth without ever touching the sides. The titanic vessel slowly turned towards the screen, and it felt to Toji as if it were staring into his very soul and finding him wanting.
Then there was a flash of emerald light, and the viewfeed died.
"Huh," Rong-Arya said. "So that's the Chouginga. Bigger than I expected."
Toji ignored her. "Liu, I need a direct psychic link to the gods. Now."
"Umm, sir?" Diaz glanced up from his console. "That might not be necessary."
"There's a galaxy-killer the size of the moon headed for Earth, Pedro. This is going to have to be a pretty big 'not necessary'."
"It is, sir. At least, I think it is. The scan results have come back, and the reason I couldn't find anything? It's because there wasn't anything to find. Just some wreckage, some residual energy signatures, and I can't even tell what they used to belong to. Our fleet and the Chouginga Dai-Gurren? They're both gone."
"Mutual kill, maybe?" Rong-Arya suggested.
"If so, I'd like to know how they did it," Toji replied. "You said Rei's plague-bombs were effective, but I didn't think they'd be this effective. That was the Spirals' ultimate superweapon you're saying we demolished there."
"At a cost," Lieutenant Deneuve stated from a corner of the room.
There was a moment's silence, and then the Primarch slowly nodded. "You're right. At a cost. Diaz, we've still got a quarter-hour's worth of transmissions to come from the interception fleet. If your readings are right, over ten thousand good people died out there, and I want to know how it happened and what they brought down with them."
Keith-Azrael's face was unnaturally pale as a matter of course. Somehow, though, he now looked even paler.
"It's been ten minutes since we lost contact with our scouts," he said. "The enemy know we're here, and they're moving to intercept fast. Retreat isn't an option – we still have the speed to make a run for it, sure, but that'd give that monster a clear run at Earth, and that is not happening. We're gearing up for a last-stand scenario, and I'll try to send across every bit of data we've got. Even if we don't stop them here – and believe me, I intend to make that a big 'if' – we should at least be able to slow them down and contribute to your knowledge-base in the process. May Lord Tzintchi preserve our souls. Out."
The screen switched to a sensor display of the local Warp-space, showing the enormous red mass that was the Chouginga Dai-Gurren and its support fleet moving towards the Chaos forces. Symbols and numbers flashed across the bottom as terabytes of compressed data poured into the Carmine Hollow computer systems.
"Fourteen minutes since the energy spike," Diaz said, "and the bad guys are still four minutes away. Something isn't right here."
On the screen, the red splotch abruptly vanished.
"What in the Warp's name?" Keith-Azrael's disembodied voice said. "Where'd they go?"
"No idea, sir," a tech-priest replied. "There's nothing on any of our instruments. Maybe they dropped into realspace?"
"Whatever the case, we'd best find out. All ships, advance at combat speed, and switch to formation Sierra-Twelve. I don't want to give them a chance to play divide-and-conquer on us."
An alarm wailed, and something vast and crimson blossomed in the middle of the fleet.
"Contact! Contact! Holy fuck, how did they get over there?"
"Stay cool, Jenkins," Keith-Azrael said. "Rossini, get me a visual. Fleet to Charlie-Nine. Encircle, engage, and try to stay out of the way of its main guns. If it looks like it's about to transform, let me know right awa- hold on, what's it doing now?"
The visual feed now dominated the screen, the undulating length of the Chouginga Dai-Gurren stretching from corner to corner. Even at a glance, though, there was obviously something wrong with it. Its structure rippled like water, fading in and out at random.
Then it vanished.
"It was an illusion?" Jenkins yelled. "Then what the fuck killed Gupta and his boys?"
"Let's find out. Mamani, scan the area. Someone must have been projecting that thing."
"You are correct, Rear Admiral." The voice was flat, robotic, and seemed to come from a hundred throats at once.
The screen switched back to showing the bridge of Keith-Azrael's flagship, its displays and monitors flickering unnervingly.
"And who are you, then?" the daemonhost asked calmly.
"We are the Data Integration Thought Entity. This ruse has now accomplished its purpose. Your fleet is ours."
Alarms wailed again, this time from the Bloodhaven side.
"It's a viral attack, sir," Diaz gasped, "coming down the line. More sophisticated than anything I've seen before. If we don't do something-"
"Then fucking do something!" Rong-Arya shouted.
"I'm trying, but I- aagh!" The tech-priest slumped over, black smoke pouring from the biomechanical access ports that plugged him into his console.
"Shit. Deneuve, get him to the med-bay." Toji turned to the remainder of the priest cadre. "Shut down the receiver, folks. They can't do anything if the power's off, right?"
"Sorry, sir," a red-robed woman with metal tentacles for eyes said, "but we tried that just now, and it didn't work. The Entity's locked us out of our own systems. We've got people trying to manually unplug the damned thing, so I don't know if that'll…"
The communications array's screen blinked off. A moment later, every other screen in the room, from satellite views of the Hollow to logistical inventories, switched to the same image that had just vanished.
"…e've found them, sir," one of Keith-Azrael's bridge staff was saying. "Four TSAB frigates, probably stuffed to the ceiling with Humanoid Interfaces."
"Seriously? That few? Jenkins, are any more of our systems back in our hands?"
"Negative, sir. In fact, we just lost the docking thrusters, and… and the Black Death's gone, sir. Its Geller field just collapsed."
"Same for the Decadent Excess and the Focused Brutality, sir," another voice reported. "And the Eternal Nightmare. On the other hand, the Investment Banker seems to be… no, we've lost that one too."
"They're toying with us," Rong-Arya growled. "They're fucking toying with us."
"Then… we toy back."
Diaz was halfway to the door, dangling from Deneuve's arms. His artificial eyes were twitching erratically, and he was bleeding from where the Marine had had to physically rip him out of his chair.
"The Entity's an infovore… right?" he wheezed. "It feeds… on data. So… we give it all the food it could ever want. Sherzai, Friedman, get the archived databanks from… the deep-Warp observation arrays out of… quarantine. Now… if you don't mind."
"You're going to try flooding them with data?" Toji asked. "Diaz, we're talking about a supercomputer the size of a small galaxy. I appreciate the thought, but I don't think a couple of old archives are going to help."
"A couple? Try… five hundred." The priest convulsed, Deneuve struggling to keep him steady as his laughter trailed off into gasping coughs.
"That many? They were supposed to last you a year each!"
"Indeed… they were. One moment, sir." Diaz convulsed again, sprinkling blood, sparks, and mechanical fluid across an increasingly alarmed Deneuve. "There, that's my self-repair systems up and running. Much better. Anyway, they should have lasted that long, yes, but that assumes we were looking at realspace. With the Warp… well, the abyss has a habit of staring back. It's pure chaos, with a small c, and it doesn't like being measured and categorised. We have to swap out the databanks every six hours. The stuff they're monitoring twists the software up like spaghetti, let alone the hardware, and if we leave it plugged in too long, it starts… leaking. It gets worse over time, too, regardless of whether there's any power to the banks or not – the couple of times we tried hooking one of the older ones up to a computer to see what was inside, the capacity read as somewhere between a few bytes and the high yottas, and then the CPU turned into something I'd prefer not to describe. In layman's terms, we're going to feed the Entity a delicious, nutritious neurotoxin burrito."
"Thank you for that mental image, Pedro," Toji said drily. "Well, I'm not seeing many alternatives – you have my go-ahead. Sophie, you can put him down now – we're going to need him around here for a bit longer. The medics will just have to come to us. Speaking of, can you give them a call? Thanks."
Another alarm sounded, this time from the still-running recording of the interception fleet's final minutes. The movements of Keith-Azrael and his bridge staff seemed to be slowing and losing their urgency – Toji suspected that they were simply giving up.
The daemonhost rubbed his eyes, half-rising from his command chair. "So what's this one about, Jenkins?"
"Warp-beasts." The officer's voice was cracked and hoarse. "They started gathering after the first few Geller fields collapsed. Sharks, blood in the water, you get the picture. Johansson's squadron on the left flank's completely buried in a feeding frenzy, and one of the bigger ones just got impatient and took a swing at our field. Stability's at seventy-five per cent and falling."
"Have we got any of our weapons back on line yet?"
"Some, and they're already firing. It hasn't attacked again yet, but I think that's because it thinks we're trying to give it a back massage."
"I… see. Well, if it's not attacking, it's not attacking. Keep it up. And Rossini, I'd really like some good news on the engines…"
"Um, excuse me, my lord…"
That last part came from a small, hunchbacked tech-priest who was currently attempting to manoeuvre a cable as thick as his wrist around Toji's hulking frame. The Primarch muttered an apology and stepped aside.
The operations room was buzzing with activity – literally as well as metaphorically, thanks to those workers whose mutations tended towards the insectile. Tech-priests scrambled back and forth, assembling new pieces of equipment and dismantling others as Magos Diaz barked out orders from his hastily improvised hospital bed and their comrades kept up a running commentary on the Entity's assault.
"… just lost containment on the northwest pens, sir. The plague zombies are loose, and they're heading for the artillery batteries."
"Elevator malfunction in the primary Evangelion hangar. Princeps Stahlheim's unit lost a leg. Nothing it can't regenerate, but his squadron's trapped in there for the time being."
"They just got through another of the firewalls for the base's fire-control systems. I hope your gear'll be ready real fucking soon, magos, because we've got about ninety seconds until we're all looking down disintegrator barrels or worse."
"Almost there, Zhu," Diaz replied. "Yes, damn it, I want all of the databanks hooked up, Takashi. We won't get another chance at this. No, that plug's supposed to go in the left socket. Your left, not mine. Otherwise, the etheric conduit ends up… oh, hell."
There was a scream, and a flash of unwholesome light.
"You, try to get Mutou scraped off the ceiling. And rebalance the pentagrammic wards while you're at it. Anyone here speak daemon, by the way? Good. You, go along with her, and for the gods' sakes, remember to bring along your cattle prod. Douse it in holy water if you have to. Warp's teeth, this is going to be tight…"
"First five databanks are linked up, sir," another tech-priest announced, "and we're already getting leakage. Terminals three through seven have stopped responding, and the feedback we're getting from number eight is really worrying. You sure you want to go ahead with this?"
Diaz's face split into a silver-toothed, blood-flecked grin. "Damn sure. Zhu, stage a total collapse of our remaining network defences in ten seconds. Disorganised as you please – I want it to look like it was their fault, not ours."
"They're through! The last firewall's down! Holy fuck, that lance-thrower's aimed at the New Syracuse!"
"Not for long it isn't – the cascade effect's started. Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred… hold onto your hats and fasten your seatbelts, boys and girls, because here we go…"
Author's Notes: Yeah, dialogue-heavy chapter, and I wasn't completely sold on how I pulled it off. If you liked it, good. If you didn't, some tips on improving would be most welcome.
