Enraged, the remaining two-thirds of the Mekker Third Fleet, who had been expecting a virtual cakewalk, took up positions to Omega Sanction the planet, while thousands of Imperial Novas and the newer Crescents walked a continual flaring of EMP’s to disrupt them and rip through their drone protectors in a wild and furious dance of orbital combat that ringed the entire world.

The Mechanists found that the planetary defenses also numbered a whole lot of brand-new missile sites and mountain-mounted rail guns that could send a payload right out of the atmosphere. The Omega Sanction had difficulty coming together under the withering and apocalyptic fire coming from the planet proper.

In the storm of combat, fusion explosions, EMP waves spritzing all the technology, and wild dogfighting between cyborgs getting fried as they hooked into their fighter and Fleet pilots, the Coronals and the Umbrans hit the Caliper.

Cloaked Umbrans in black and Coronals in gold, all with mindblades displayed, teleported aboard the Caliper after a momentary hole was punched in its Interdiction by a steely-eyed Fleet fighter captain who did not survive the attack run on the emitter node. They drove for the bridge and engineering, accompanied by half-cloaked Guards of both orders, bearing their mindshields and making certain their wards survived the murderous attack of the Mechanist elite and borgaii, and their attack droids.

Mindblades against power swords. Sun Shots against plasma guns. Psionic explosions against rockets. Psionic barriers against force fields. Psi-boosted flesh against alloy limbs. Wired reflexes against prescience. Self-repair nanites against biometabolic healing.

“YOU HAVE FAILED THE GOD OF THE MACHINE.”

The voice was quiet, grim, somehow sad. It ripped through the entire Mekker fleet with an awful fluidity, bypassing all code and filters, and for a moment, every cyborg attacker reeled with the sensation of being touched by something far, far beyond them.

The attackers surged forward in explosions of motion, and dying bots and cyborgs.

---

Duke Honus Parablum, leader of His Imperial Majesty’s Order of the Rising Sun of Janus III for the past fifty-six years, stormed onto the bridge of the Caliper. His last Coronal Guard, Jimo de Habber, born a street punk in Downspire long ago, breached the force field warding the bridge with his Mindshield, the feedback blowing him and his power armor apart as it went down.

Sir Dorval, the last of his Coronal Knights, took the initial barrage of desperate assaults from the bridge defenses, deflected half of it back at its originators to take out all the mechanized defenses, and poured his life into a blazing Sun Stroke that took out three Black Skull Terminator kill-borgs together in an explosion that didn’t leave an intact pound of his flesh behind.

Duke Parablum Blinked around the bridge in a blur of motion, and every living defender perished in the shredding floral display of his silver mindblade. The Archimandrite gazed at him without emotion, preparing to detonate his power core as he calculated a transfer protocol to a new clone-body.

He was still looking down the silver sword when the blacklight pistol in the Duke’s other hand shot him in the face.

There was perhaps a millisecond of surprise, and then any hint of life in every cell of the Archimandrite’s body turned forty-seven-ish degrees, and was gone.

The Duke rammed a command override module into the Caliper’s primary weapon systems, and as TL 18 programs warred against protesting TL 15 command codes, began to redirect the Caliper’s guns.

----

Duke Rimval, Duke of His Imperial Majesty’s Order of the Fallen Moon for the last fifty-five years, watched Philip Marwengora die, ripped apart by arcs of raw electrical discharge, even as his last Sun Shot blew out the attacker’s brain box with uncanny precision.

Brekko, his last surviving Guard, went flying as a whole chain of explosive rounds detonated on his Mindshield. He slammed into the wall hard, leaving a bloody stain behind as he hit the floor... but Rimval had time to jam the nix driver into a download slot, and Brekko had prevented it from being blown away.

Rimval swirled through the shadows and rammed his mindsword through the shooter’s cortex, slashed right and shot left, and the last two engineering guards died explosively.

He saw Brekko’s life ebb away, gone before he could reach the quiet, sharply observant Guard, one of the first to take up the duty for the Umbrans, and one of the most senior of all the mindclaw-bearing Nulls.

They were all dead.

“I’ve got Engineering for maybe two minutes,” he whispered through his Mark. He didn’t have to say how many were left alive.

Duke Honus Parablum, at the far end of the ship, smiled grimly. “Good fighting with you again, Rimval. How long has it been?”

“Twenty-four years, nine months, eleven days,” the Umbran Duke said, taking up his position.

“The Klastamar incident,” Duke Parablum remembered with a smile. He watched the displays as the weapons of the Caliper began to retask and fire at dangerous rates of fire and energy consumption, taking all power away from the ship’s shields as they did so.

Neighboring Mekker vessels reeled under the onslaught of the ship’s guns. Below, the power core of the ship was whining as its energy production began to spike rapidly to feed the guns, very quickly reaching and racing past the danger thresholds.

Alarms began to ring throughout the ship. Overheating conduits screamed at the loads of power being pumped through them faster than they could vent and cool, and the batteries of the Caliper unloaded with suicidal frenzy.

Three Mekker cruisers blew apart, and two were crippled by the bombardment before the Mekker captains steeled themselves to turn their guns on the defenseless Caliper and fire.

--------

It wasn’t just the fleets and the planets below who watched the Dukes’ final moments. As the mighty Caliper was blown apart around them, they entered a deadly melee with the desperate defenders seeking to take back the positions the Dukes and their subordinates had taken, men and mindblades defending the world that was their charge from traitors and cyberized rebels no longer men, just machines reaping the flesh of brave heroes.

The whole Sector saw it in real time, watching it from beginning to end. Marks were excellent for relaying feeds in real time.

There were no nymphals. There were no Ancients. There were Coronals with their millennia of duty and golden cloaks, and dark men in dark garb silently doing what had to be done.

Once again fighting back against the machine gone mad... against those who had failed the God of the Machine.

----

The Celestial Tribute came out of basically nowhere, the Gate it powered up sliding past in an instant and gone, abruptly hanging just above the frantic battlezone happening above Janus III, still in time to see the last remnants of the Caliper’s cooling death throes spiraling out of control through space.

The cruisers and frigates behind it flashed away with Harmonic Drive precision, suddenly in a broad and interlinked pattern of overlapping fire above the harried Mekker Fleet.

The Tribute’s hull split open, and a horde of MF gunboats and upgraded Crescents emerged like a river of light-spitting steel, while its weapon ports belched out fire so focused that even the starfire brilliance of it was barely threads of light reaching out and touching the Mekker ships.

Behind it, the battleships and heavy cruisers of the Corunsun Fleet opened up with pure heavenly judgement coming to bear.

-----

Briggs stared at the tableau. The holos of the bridge were immersive and omnidirectional, even if the bridge was deep inside the Tribute and very, very safe from return fire.

Beat was drumming in his hand like a great steel-bending heartbeat, thrumming in the hearts of every Marked as they came down like a light-spitting angelic host riding starfire and steel.

---

Drone defenses popped like firecrackers, cannon emplacements and missile batteries blew apart, launch bays exploded in pretty flames, and power conduits lit up the void as the merciless precision of pilots who knew exactly where all the weak points were did their things.

Shield generators formed plumes of superheated metal particles, and with horrifying timing, the guns of the Corunsun fleet poured through the holes before the other generators could compensate for the weak point.

Plasma from superheated matter flared bright in the void, slowly cooling as it spiraled like flowers.

Spread out to Omega Sanction the planet, the Mekker Fleet was hugely vulnerable from the massed fire of the fleet coursing past them and picking them off with murderous precision.

The force on the far side of the planet managed to make the command decision to withdraw and regroup, trying to keep the planet between them and the Tribute’s escorts.

The fleet breached the horizon, lined it up, and Briggs’ boy Admiral Horatio spat, “Jump!”

A Harmonic Jump spanned a hundred and fifty thousand miles in one second, and the entire fleet was looming right above the withdrawing Mekkers, while the hapless ships left behind were defanged by the raging fighter squadrons and crippled soon thereafter.

Massed Sun Shots from ship cannons went off with disconcertingly faint light, impossibly efficient and focused, no wasted energy, and the Corunsuns began to walk their fire up the line of Mekker ships who could not possibly get away. Rail guns spit out Sun-Shot munitions that were visible, indeed, slicing through every raised shield and detonating in sunfire, kinetic joy of release, and atomized metal.

---

Briggs turned back to the six people in the room with him. “I apologize once again.”

Vala, Bluma, Philia, Brekka, Dorva, and Jyma Rantha smiled back at him. Brekka rubbed the back of her head, while Jyma put her hand to her chest. Dorva was rubbing her temples, while Philia was subconsciously checking to make sure all her limbs were there.

Vala and Bluma closed their eyes, centered themselves, and opened them back up. “Not a bad way to die,” Vala said, tossing her dark hair back calmly. She reached out, and Bluma took her hand automatically. “We’ll be fine... Dad,” she finished, and Briggs looked over and rolled his eyes at the same time.

Step-dad, sure...

“Any problems with the integration?” he asked, looking over all of them.

“Made Eleven,” Jyma remarked quietly, shaking her head, and excising the memory of being slammed into a bulkhead so hard the back of Brekko’s head had caved in.

“It feels wonderful being so smart,” Brekka smiled despite herself. “Oh, and I made Eleven too, boss.”