-Oh, no shit,- I /laughed as Celestia’s feat was relayed to me. -Okay, she arranged for a dead biomech. What’s that got to do-?-

Crim was /grinning in Markchat. -Well, the sergeant and the two mechs that took down the titan drafted her into splitting open the pshields of other titans. She’d jump on them with her Null ignoring the shields, cut down the shield emitters, and the sergeant would paint the target area for a missile drop or sniping attack.

-She got six of them killed in one day, and the Kasas are giddy about working with Ranthas to pick off the brutes. By the end of the next day, half the cavalry assets of the invaders were burning mounds, and they are being pushed back across the city!-

I /laughed to myself. Crim had started off the whole spiel with quiet whispers from the girls who really didn’t want me back, thanks, they could handle it, keep tinkering about in that TL 17 ship in the middle of nowhere, and don’t bust the Warp Zone while you’re at it, we got this...

Briggs was getting his own update, looked at me, and rolled his eyes. “Something cute?” I asked him, laughing aloud.

“Other than the competition for goriest ripping off of xenosym heads, not really.” He sighed. “I’ve lost a couple hundred of the boys. You?”

“Half that, all newest generation who hadn’t gotten to Five. Once they get that point of Regeneration, they are very, very hard to kill... although I’ve been told that getting pinned under thousands of tons of rubble waiting to be dug out is very not fun.”

“Agreed.” Getting to Five as rapidly as possible was a thing, only it couldn’t be done fast because of the Leveling restrictions here. The latest batch simply hadn’t had time to advance fast enough before all the shit was breaking loose, and so we’d lost some of them.

The girls were also collecting souls of our people, and they were awaiting more tubes and a chance at a new life as our kids. There were going to be a lot of Vats hard at work once this was all over...

Regeneration/Holy Silver was not at all easy for the things we fought to overcome, after all. All of the kids started with immunity to death effects, about the only alternative to bypass it.

So, yeah, the older kids knew they were almost impossible to kill easily, and weren’t above taking advantage of it. Of course, taking a paraspike at Mach 5 to the chest would still blow them to pieces, and be both time-consuming and embarrassing, especially if the xenos around were trying to digest biomass at the same time...

So, prudence, and merciless savagery when needed. They weren’t stupid, and testing the limits of our resistance to being killed was something for the enemy to work out, not us, although they were aggregating a nicely comprehensive database nowabouts...

The fight in the stars was not exactly over, but the enemy had definitely retreated in shocked disorder, and the battered remnants of the Reserve Fleet were worrying it across the system, peeling off every straggler one by one and eliminating them. The enemy was rapidly losing any sort of numerical advantage, and was gunning for a harmonic point that would let them Necrojump out of the system.

They were not gonna be very happy when they realized we could calculate those points, and that Interdiction systems were not at all uncommon on ships crewed by my kids. They were gonna pull that shit, expend that power, bring in that death... and the Warp wasn’t going to open up to take it.

The feedback was probably going to amount to a lot more than a headache.

The wars on the ground were far from over. Every city on the planet was embroiled in war... or was dead, smoking in ruin as they detonated antimatter reactors and took down the Domes which kept out the killing atmosphere. Spires were detonated one after another as they fell, denying the biomass to the enemy, and huge sections of the Undercities were slagged.

The loss in lives and materials was colossal. Whether or not they succeeded, the efforts of humanity on this rock had been set back by centuries, and we’d been made vulnerable to anything that wanted to come in and take a swipe at us.

Threshold Prime was already overwhelmed with work as the remnants of the System Fleet staggered back into dock, and other crews and ships could only tumble in the void, waiting for a tow in, one by one.

The corpses of the bioships were all burning in the void. Efforts would be made to send each of them into the sun, which would accept them with equanimity, in due time.

------

Of course, Briggs and I had been having our own brand of fun.

Oh, it could have been a grand tale of fast-moving combat, automatons exploding apart under Sword and Hammer, leaping and flying, many explosions and violent interior decorating, unlimited numbers of mechanical enemies coming from all directions as they tried to see us and pin us down, while we ran all about the sections of the ship trying to do some insane fix-it quest that simply wasn’t possible with the numbers arrayed against us.

Well, we did all that, sure, but that was the distraction, see.

Neither of us was dumb, and if an army of ‘vores hadn’t been able to outlast the internal defenses, we sure weren’t going to be able to. We never came close to any of the fabbers making spare bots, so the AIs weren’t going to run out of anything. They swept any wrecks and reprocessed them into raw materials for re-use, as clean as any biovore.

We wanted those fabbers for our own, anyways.

We didn’t trust any of the AIs, period, including the primary system. They’d been subjected to the waves from the Throne field too long, there was going to be corruption, and not even the most secure self-diagnosis system was going to hold up against them after this long.

Now, purging those systems was likely going to be totally impossible. Cleaning them, on the other hand...

The fact was, any corruption they had suffered was going to be suffused with energies of the Warp. So, the key thing was to filter out any files with warp corruption, and the self-repair stuff would basically take care of itself.

Really, the whole link-up thing was complete bullshit. Sure, a hard connection would be more efficient. But simple cables or wi-fi could do the same thing, just not as optimally fast.

So, all our racing around and creating excitement in probes and explorations was just to set up a few relays, and more precisely, to get the Copiers into position.

These were very simple computer systems optimized for utmost speed, and all they did is copy/paste programs from one location to another. Thus, for instance, the Helm AI of the Celestial Tribute could invade the systems of the other locations, shut down their defenses, and allow us to make the hardline connections.

Of course, when it copied itself into the other system, its copy was getting run through massive sanctified psi-artificed Rantha-tech. Being a machine, it had no ability whatsoever to detect the elements of Good running through the systems, it could only measure the disruptions from the Throne field and conclude that indeed, this technology was much more resistant to disruption of the Throne field than the unbelievably sophisticated yet basic AMT tech it was employing. Given the advance of time, there was no reason not to believe that technology had advanced in some respects, even if what we were wearing was nothing exceptional in its eyes.

As it went through the Copier, the Copier cleansed out the corrupted programs, the decayed and false code was purged away, and the new version was arranged in the Axiomatic and Holy formats that would resist further corruption... and also realize that there had been alterations in its core programming. The Copier would then start to run in both directions once it reached critical mass, as the Helm AI tried to subsume all the functions of the connected AI... and would then find itself being copied into, and then directed to copy and paste itself through the Copier to reclaim its full functionality.

So, our attacks were just meant to cover the fact that we dropped off a Copier, suborned a drone, had that drone carry a command to a warehousing bot, had the mover bot fetch the Copier ‘out of storage’, and then bring it out and set it up into auxiliary status with the local AI. The primary command codes would be downloaded, access would start up, and the Helm AI bounced along the relays and began its invasion.

It took less than an hour for the defenses to go offline. With that, we were able to take the backup Copiers, plug them into the hardline connection, fix them up, and wait for both AI’s to copy everything of themselves through the hardline in both directions.

Of course, we had to sit there and swap out set after set of glowing vak-boards as they began to bubble and turn black and stuff, putting them en vivus solemnly as the Blessed tech did its thing.

The AI’s were blabbing about self-diagnostics and synch rates and harmonics and coding discrepancies and programming failures and blah blah non-stop as zillions of tiny errors were burned away back and forth. If there were true errors, I could spin out some temporary TL 10 stuff to help them get through the problem, with suitable annotations to make it obvious they were not permanent solutions, and the systems continued on their moving of mountains of data back and forth inside themselves.

We went through over ten dozen vak-boards before they were all done. One of them turned into worms as we pulled it out. How ‘bout that?

With the forward science areas humming and synching up, and repair bots moving in to start repairs of the bridge area busily, we grandly followed similar plans with the other AI cores. The Printers quickly manufactured a whole lot more vak-boards, because the corruption only got stronger as we went down the main shaft.

---------

“Duke Briggs, penetration into the Throne section is not advised at this time.”

“Or any time?” he grumbled back to the AI.

“Likely not, sir. Not without some extremely specialized weaponry this ship is not capable of making.”

“You are not aware that the Duchess and I are extremely specialized weapons against this type of infestation.”

There was a quiet hum from the drone bobbing in the air between us. There was a whole section of psi-warded heavy warbots behind us, and crackling fields trying to contain the most overt effects of the regular pulses coming out of the corrupted Throne.

“Efforts to contain the corruption coming out of the Throne have proven to be less than effective, Your Grace. Have there been improvements in this area during the interim?”

“Yes, some of them very specialized, indeed, on the genetic and spiritual level.” He spun Beat like it was some toy hammer instead of a Construct-sundering adamant deathbringer. “Cycle the lock. I have no doubt it will open easily. You are ordered to shoot anything on the other side you can see, and if you cannot stop it, we can.”

The two of us flattened against the walls. There was only a moment of hesitation, and the drone hummed and beeped.

There was something ectoplasmic and brightly colored growing over the panel. Nevertheless, lights beeped underneath it, somehow looking twisted and wrong, and a sound like someone gasping after pulling a nail out of their hands accompanied the slow rising of the durasteel lock ahead of us.

There were things on the other side. They looked at us in surprise, we looked at them, and then a whole lot of metal moving very fast, hefty plasma charges, shredding sonic grenades, and writhing discharges of particle beams and x-ray lasers tore everything in that entryway apart.

Pro Tip: Neutron beams, solar-grade luminous plasma, and x-ray lasers are considered concentrated Radiant damage, and Warp demons aren’t resistant or immune to them.

The shrieks were mostly in the mindscape; we watched the things of the Warp get shredded very efficiently, and the far side of the chamber get painted with a lot of slag.