52. Welcome to the Jungle

The invasion fleet's arrival in Chaos territory was not especially dramatic. It mostly consisted of travelling forward for a few more minutes, crossing a red dotted line on their navigation screens, and then wondering where the enemy were.

"What do you mean, you can't see them?" Thundra yelled. "They're several kilometres long, they're covered in spikes, and there's three thousand of them. This isn't exactly needle-in-a-haystack territory, people!"

The lead sensors officer sighed. "Look, I'm sorry, sir, but the Warp's stirred up something fierce around their planet, and our ships just aren't adapted to these conditions like theirs are. Frankly, it's a miracle we can even move through this, let alone see anything past a few thousand kilometres."

"Guh. Fine. Kimidori, you got anything?"

"I apologise, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra. Normally, this would be well within my capabilities, but-"

"… but you're still reeling from the bad guys kicking your ass six ways to Saint's Day. Yeah, yeah, I get it."

"That is… correct. However, whilst I cannot determine their precise numbers, there do appear to be a significant concentration of metallic bodies in the storm system immediately between us and the planet."

Thundra massaged his temples. "Well, sounds like that's the best we're going to get from anyone here. Spread out the fleet, and keep an eye out for flankers. We'll advance towards the planet, keeping up a rolling Arc-en-ciel bombardment to flush out whoever's hiding out there. Oh, and I hope those Alpha Quadrant hicks are still listening to us, 'cos someone's going to need to get on the horn to them about moving their ships. Don't think them being in front of our big guns when we open fire will help anyone, least of all them."

Beside him, Wilson saluted. "Of course, sir."

"Arc-en-ciels one, two, and three fully charged, sir," the weapons officer reported. "We can fire when ready."

"Glad to hear it," Thundra replied. "Set for sustained fire, cannon two first, then wait for my mark…"


Far out on the western flank of the fleet, the Eventide rolled into position, its manoeuvring thrusters flaring. There were no such things as north, south, east, and west in space, of course, let alone in the Warp, but humans, being children of gravity, tended to think in those terms, so it helped for a fleet to assign some arbitrary co-ordinates before entering battle so everyone had a rough idea of where they were going.

Everything was prepared. The infirmary had been cleared, the coilguns were fully-loaded, and every Device on the ship was charged to its (usually) metaphorical gills. Colonel Hayate Yagami stood on the bridge, glowing faintly from her interface with the Unison Device Reinforce Zwei.

She opened the fleet channel. "Task Force Dolga, this is the Eventide, Ninth Scouting Squadron. We're charged and ready."

"We hear ya, Eventide," a cheerfully raspy voice replied. "Save some for us, huh? Commander Meriva, Twelfth Heavy Squadron, ready to roll."

"Fourth Scouting, ready."

"Relentless Avenger, Third Assault, geared up to kick some mutant ass."

Green lights lit up across the console display, each signalling an acknowledgement from one of the Bureau fleet's hundreds of warship squadrons. Their own task force, led by the newly-launched heavy cruiser Dolga, was enclosed in a blue box on the left, and every light inside it was now green.

"This is Fleet Admiral Lindy Harlaown, Dolga, First Command Squadron. Looks like everyone's ready. Fire-pattern will be a sustained bombardment with a one-twenty degree three-dimensional sweep, so remember to check your recharge times and match up your shots so we don't have any gaps. Begin prefire sequences in three… two… one…"

"Commencing barrel expansion," Lieutenant Rostov announced.

The external monitor showed a new constellation forming in the howling darkness of the Warp, glowing charging rings forming around one set of projector fins after another.

Hayate paused, and took a deep breath. This is it. This is when the killing starts.

"Firing Lock System, open."


The light gathering in front of the Void's Wrath was dazzling. Without the monitor's filtering, it would have blinded everyone in the room. Thundra took the key from around his neck, and slid it into the lock.

"All right, boys and girls, let's make 'em taste the rainbow. MARK!"

He turned the key, and a thousand Arc-en-ciels opened fire.


Meanwhile, some distance away on a quite different starship, a quite different fleet commander felt the psychic backwash flow over her and grinned a broad, razor-sharp grin.

"Party time."


There was, popular military wisdom had it, nothing that could withstand a direct hit from an Arc-en-ciel. In this war and elsewhere, popular military wisdom had so far been proven right. The weapon's only weakness (apart from its unfortunate and rather embarrassing habit of exploding when hit whilst firing) was that it took far too long to recharge once you shot it, which meant that if you missed, or if the enemy had somehow managed to bring along enough ships that a two-hundred-kilometre-radius sphere of reality-warping doom wouldn't get rid of all of them, you were in a sticky situation indeed.

Which was why the Void's Wrath had three of them.

Every sixty seconds, the Bureau flagship shuddered as one of its main guns fired, tearing apart space/time in a blossom of unwholesome light. There was a shallow dome of pure annihilation in front of the fleet now, slowly advancing ahead of it towards Bloodhaven.

"Sensors, we hitting anything?" Thundra barked.

"That's an affirmative, sir. The bombardment's reached the area Kimidori marked, and we've got a few readings that suggest hard contact. See that? That's a Chaos Warp drive imploding. Somebody took a glancing hit."

"So we're thinning their numbers. Good. Keep an eye out for any nasty surprises, though." This is way too easy.


"They've started hitting Lambert's group, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust reported. "They're taking losses."

"Has his control ship gone down, or is it just crafted and servitors so far?" Rong-Arya asked.

"The latter, ma'am."

"Good. Have the Mauler pull back – all his ships need to do now is explode dramatically, and I'd rather if we don't lose any humans or ascended if we don't have to."

The New Syracuse's bridge was bigger than the Conqueror's, and despite having more people in it, it somehow seemed rather emptier. Still, Rong-Arya was glad she'd left Cassandra on Earth, especially after how her last battle had gone.

"They're probably getting a bit overconfident by now. Choi, have we mapped out their fleet?"

The tech-priest nodded. "Aye, ma'am. Bit vague and fuzzy in places, but good enough."

"Excellent. Watanabe, Group Four, you're up. Time for some weapons testing."


"Contact bearing two-zero-five high!" the Void's Wrath's sensors officer yelled. "Thirty warships, closing fast – they're headed for the Spirals!"

"Warn them, and have our nearby squadrons stop firing," Thundra replied. "Don't want anyone getting fried by a backfiring Arc-en-c-"

A red stain appeared near the middle of the fleet on the tactical map, spreading outwards and engulfing all in its path.

"… yeah, like that. I thought you said they were behind us and headed for the Spirals. How the hell did that happen?"

Two more blasts lit the holographic projection, one from the northwest and another from the southeast, and the fleet channel erupted in a sea of voices.

"Contact oh-nine-three! Holy shit, they're right on top of u-"

"The Flame of Ruwella is gone! I say again, the Flame of Ruwella is gone!"

"Lost the signal – they were here a second ago, I swear they were…"

"Hull breach! We've got casualties! What the fuck just hit us?"

"Where did they come from? Kaiser damn it, where did they come from?"

"Enough!" Thundra roared. "You're soldiers, damn you, so act like it! They're trying to psych us into stopping the bombardment and breaking up our formation. Keep the channel clear, spread out to avoid friendly fire, and see if you can map out their course so far. I want to know how they got behind us, and how they're moving so fast. Kimidori, you got anything?"

"Perhaps, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra. There is something familiar about these vessels' movements. I may need to analyse it furth- oh. That is curious. I can no longer detect them within the range of my sensors. They appear to have retreated."

"A probing attack, then. Guess they got what they came for. Keep up the bombardment, but up the defences on our flanks and rear. We may have no idea how they can get behind us like that, but we do know they can."

Thundra stared at the display again. They had lost over fifty ships in a matter of minutes without scoring a single confirmed kill. Now that they had a slightly better idea of what they were up against, the outcome next time would presumably be somewhat more even, but it was not an encouraging start. Especially given how badly our people freaked out. This is going to be a meatgrinder, and the Bureau doesn't do meatgrinders. Forget weapons or ships – do we even have the mindset for this?


Rong-Arya lit a celebratory cigarette. "Look like the new gear works just fine. Commander, how're our reinforcements looking?"

"ETA is in three hours, ma'am," her executive officer replied. "The gods lit a real fire under their asses – they're coming in force."

"Three? Yep, that'll work. Time for Phase Two. Groups Nine and Eighty-One, see if you can stir up the Warp a little more, give us some extra cover. Groups Thirty-Six through Fifty-Four, use it to hit and run. Conventional gear only, no Suzumiyaverse exotica for the moment, and no stupid heroics. If it looks like you're taking major losses, or if your command ship's in trouble, just pull out. The other groups will cover you."

Beneath her chair, the massive reactors of the New Syracuse growled like a caged animal. Which was, she reflected, probably quite close to the truth. Don't worry. Lunchtime's soon, and I guarantee you'll have all the tasty little morsels you could ever want.

There was blood on her cigarette, left behind from the underside of a claw. Apparently, she hadn't cleaned up after the last batch of prisoners as well as she'd thought.


"… And here they come," Sensors called. "Contacts on multiple approach vectors – they're avoiding the bombardment, but they're coming in from pretty much every other direction. No sign of those weird movement patterns we saw last time – maybe those were elites?"

"Possible, but let's not bank on it," Thundra replied. "No risks. Numbers?"

"Several hundred, sir, organised into groups of about thirty like last time."

"So a good amount then, but nowhere near their full strength. Must be a raid-in-force. Thundra to all units, the enemy's trying to harass us again. You have permission to engage, but play it defensive. Try not to pursue too far. Kimidori, you and your people try to figure out where they're coming from."

He paused a moment, then re-opened the fleet channel.

"These are the people who killed your families. These are the people who burned your worlds. These are the people who've made themselves enemies of the whole multiverse, and they're staring right down the barrels of your guns. Give 'em hell. Thundra out."


The Eventide rolled, vast, magical wings spinning it to face the enemy as its Arc-en-ciel projector fins burned with country-demolishing power. Its main gun fired into the approaching Chaos warships, obliterating half a dozen at once, but more followed them. Many more.

The enemy had learned from their previous encounters with the Bureau, spreading out their ships to avoid the worst of the damage from Arc-en-ciel fire, and despite the fleet commanders' efforts, their ambush had worked far too well – not only were most of the fleet's big guns pointing in the wrong direction, but their foes were too close and moving too fast for even ships facing the right way to get more than one shot in before they ended up on top of them.

"Prepare for close-quarters combat," Hayate ordered, trying to sound more confident than she felt. "Come forth, wind of snow, and become the fletching that falls from the heavens."

Four targeting reticules appeared on the screen, each landing on one of the massive cruisers.

"Eventide, Hræsvelgr!"

The sorcerous blasts lanced into the Chaos ships, their void shields flaring with the impact. Other Bureau escorts zipped forwards, mobbing them like hunting dogs after elephants. The Eventide was already repositioning, ravening dark lance beams tracing the void behind it, and Hayate already had another target in her sights.

"Eventide, Ragnarok!"

A spike-encrusted frigate was sliced in half, the thousand probing beams of the Mistress of the Night Sky's spell hammering into the shields of the battlecruiser behind it. A swarm of daemons spiralled upwards towards her frigate's vulnerable underbelly and she hastily raised a shield, holding them at bay long enough for the point-defence batteries to tear them apart. There was no time for reflection, no time to consider how many living beings were dying at her hands. Everything she did was instinctual, automatic. Point and click. Point and click. Point and click.

"Leeron, are the transporters ready?"

"Sure thing, sugar," the Spiral engineer sang cheerily. "Ready, loaded, and looking fabulous."

Since the formation of the alliance, the member nations had discovered quite a number of mutually-beneficial synergies in their technologies. Given the nature of said alliance, most of them were based around hurting people. For example, the Bureau's transporters could bypass most known forms of shield (including voids), which they mostly used to send in boarding parties to sabotage enemy ships and pacify their crews. Unfortunately, the bizarre and hazardous conditions aboard Chaos warships tended to make boarding them quite inadvisable. Alpha Quadrant transporters, on the other hand, could not bypass void shields, but the Federation had just finished upgrading its torpedoes to quantums, and consequently had a considerable number of obsolete and conveniently-sized photon warheads just lying around.

Fifty-eight of them were currently stored in the Eventide's hold.

A Bureau cruiser exploded, disintegrator fire pounding it into oblivion. Hayate steered into the debris field, shielding her ship from the enemy's sensors as she called up another spell from the Tome of the Night Sky's endless archives of stolen magic.

"Unfold, shining path, and guide us through the outer darkness."

The Eventide's hull rippled, seeming to fade in and out of reality for a moment.

"Eventide, Shadow Step."

The frigate vanished, reappearing between a pair of Chaos ships. Through the visual display, Hayate saw row upon row of massive, gargoyle-adorned turrets begin to turn towards her.

"Lieutenant, are we locked on?"

"Aye, ma'am," Lieutenant Rostov replied. "Transporters one and two, engage."

By the standards of the war against Chaos, photon warheads were severely underpowered, incapable of penetrating (or even significantly damaging) an enemy warship's void shields or adamantium shell. That was not a major concern, however, when the explosion came from inside said warship.

One warhead materialised inside the first ship's main reactor chamber, its outer casing boiling away in nanoseconds to reveal its raw antimatter heart. The engines flared, massive exhaust plumes ripping them apart from the inside out, and the cruiser lurched forwards, tumbling end-over-end as the lights on its hull slowly died and its weapon batteries ceased firing.

The other found its way to the second ship's prow torpedo bays, its explosion mingling with that of dozens more warheads. The entire front half of that vessel vanished, the peeled, blackened remainder resembling nothing so much as an empty metal banana skin as secondary explosions glittered in its ravaged depths.

The Eventide, meanwhile, had already left them behind, the little warship shuddering as it passed through the shields of an enormous battleship. Knuckles whitening as she pressed her hands into the Magical Interface System control crystals, Hayate began another incantation.

"Approach from the beyond, mistletoe branches, and become spears of the silver moon."

Glowing white orbs appeared around the frigate in a hexagonal formation, pulsing gently.

"Eventide, Misteltien!"

The orbs lashed towards the capital ship, becoming long, arrow-tipped spears. They sank into its hull, its brightly-painted colours fading to grey as the spell converted metal into brittle stone. The Eventide's coilguns pounded the affected area, great clouds of powdery dust billowing out as the hull crumbled away.

There were bodies in the wreckage. Some of them were still moving.

Point and click. Point and click. Point and click.


Author's Notes: Yep, the Doorstop is back. This update was originally supposed to be larger, but it started getting too large, so I decided to split it. Fortunately, that means much of the second half is done, so that should be showing up relatively soon.

Also, I am so, so sorry for the pun. Not sorry enough not to include it, but still very sorry.