Compressed anti-matter was squeezed from the front and the back, and naturally blown all over the place to even greater effect as it was. It was Compressed into ring form, not a sphere, so it might expand down into the incoming cone of the solid warhead behind, and the resulting explosion would launch the anti-matter in all directions sideways and ahead.

The frigate’s bridge blew apart in a properly actinic eruption of 180-degree energy release, which blew through the interior of the ship very quickly, indeed. The graceful ship did have a lot of new holes to help vent the explosions going on, instead of coming apart at the seams, but when the blast reached the Quantum Field Core of the drive, welp, that was definitely the end of things.

The main engines were blown right off the ship, the sunsails sparked, darkened, and wilted instantly, and the drow frigate was now a drifting hulk. A Furnace ship was going to be happy to come by and collect it, then sell the recycled raw materials to the Elvar...

I dipped down and directly away from the incoming Shadowmoth that thought it might still be unnoticed, smirking, and drove towards the incoming destroyer... and, not incidentally, a few squadrons of Darkwasps that had to yet be introduced to the full range of my main guns and Turrets...

With a gravity ripple that didn’t cause alarms because I knew that it was there, the Shadowmoth came out of the spatial fold that it had been hiding in, a looming, hugely moth-winged ship with skull patterns showing on its sunsails, a good two kilometers long and easily that wide with its sails up.

The vibe I got was vast irritation, and when it actually shot a few of the main guns in my direction, I had to laugh as I danced between the huge beams that couldn’t possibly adjust their aim fast enough to hit me, and the stuff that could didn’t have the range.

Wasps were falling apart ahead of me as the desperate starjockeys tried to avoid my Turrets, and found out just how nasty an ignore-concealment +17 RAB + 20 Dexterity bonus can actually be.

Oh, and +5 Ex-lite Luck. Sometimes, it was like they just accidentally flew their wired reflexed selves right into my line of fire, poor chaps...

I blew right through their squadron, spinning and spitting shots in all directions as they tried to separate and come at me from all angles... and I spun and shot them from all angles in response. The void flowered with burning oxygen and hungry fusion behind me, they all wheeled to pursue me, and all four turrets kept right on firing along the superbly-coordinated pursuit pattern they were using, as if the drow were arranging themselves to be picked off.

Oh, they managed to clip me a few times. Faith snarked, the shields soaking some of the energy, conducting more to him and me to clearly ignore, and the hull dealt absently with the rest before conducting it into the guns and engines to conserve power.

Chalice was Singing away, on all frequencies, AND the ECM was attuned to it, meaning there was pretty much no way the drow could not hear us and pay attention. The Trembling Song had a LOT of psychic backing right now, if only concentrated among those who were fighting really hard... or singing to ghosts, maybe. Psi-active, higher Level people Singing the same Song gave it a lot of power, and I was sure their own psions were cursing as they tried to fight against the pervasive power of it.

Hells, we had ongoing concerts of Minstrels and Bards leading recitals and songs for Marked in warzones dozens of light years away from one another, sending down the blessings and support and doing what they could from faraway places. Pockets of Markspace were always ringing with ongoing Bardsong for troops in all the places, ‘cause Ranthas make war with ALL the tools...

The Dojo wasn’t moving, although the appearance of the highest tech-level human cruiser in the galaxy would not have been a happy event for any of the drow here. Sure, it wasn’t kitted out as a pure warship. But alpha strikes were things, and the Dojo could certainly deliver one hell of an alpha strike, even if it was loaded for exploration.

“That’s the Quilloceptra,” Chalice noticed, a minor fact as multiple miles/second closed between the destroyer and me. I flicked some attention at the Shadowmoth overhead, while Chalice flicked up the files.

Ah, yes, its captain, the Whisperer, was one of the more famous drow corsairs in the galaxy, a renegade captain that even the noble lords in Gloomheart couldn’t really tame. There was a list of atrocities attributed to him going back over a thousand years.

Suddenly this little bit of light exercise became a little more serious.

“He doesn’t have Interdiction up,” I noted with a professional eye for mischief. “That spatial folding stuff must make him really confident.”

“You have a nasty idea in mind!” Chalice sang in delight, and all my Weapons hummed in expectation.

“You’ll notice he has a pretty big launch bay, what with all the Wasps he’s launching out of it. How about you Gate us right into the middle of it? Prep an Interdictor, I don’t want him to get away by folding into Gloom; make him launch and we can chase and cut him down.”

Mad calculations started as course computations were required, and the capapsitor that would amplify the Gatecut began to charge up very quickly, indeed, especially as I was expending Nimbuses to post-superconduct the energy into it. Snap, snap, snap, snap, four of them every cycle from that devoted thoughtstream, while Grim held one in reserve...

“Gating!” Chalice announced, as our local Interdiction was cut, the forward mandibles of the ship pulsed, and space-cutting energy sheathed along her edge and the suddenly sharp dual prow ahead of us.

The Turrets folded back in, and sections of the hull Compressed towards the center. The engines were aligned to be exactly one inch less than the edges of the Gate we could cut open, so the hull had to move back just far enough to squeeze in. Vertical wasn’t a problem, but width with Turrets out was.

“Cutting!” I Flared a Nimbus even as the first heavy photon round from the destroyer-class Deathbat-style ship ahead was coming my way, and it ran right into the opposite side of the Gate as we entered it.

That naturally meant it came out from one side as we emerged from the other. Instead of splattering us, the hanger deck behind us erupted in coherent light venting artificial mass into the internal structures of the flight deck of the Quilloceptra.

The Flitter’s hull deCompressed as fast as it had shrunken, and the side Turrets came back out as suddenly I was out in the middle of a fairly spacious hangar deck, replete with hanging docks for Darkwasps, and tech-slaved minions and drow all tumbling as the shock wave of that internal hit from the forward guns of the Darkbat did its thing.

Heck, we weren’t even really being paid attention to for the moment. The Gate matched intrinsics, dumped momentum as we went through, and we were hovering right there for a pregnant second or two as the side Turrets flipped back into place.

Then, of course, we let go with everything.

Didn’t need any armor-piercing here, Seeking, Distance, or even Accuracy. This was pure destruction, Construct-Bane mode, and rapid-fire annihilation of everything. Everyone shifted their Arsenal configurations appropriately.

The Darkwasps that hadn’t launched yet, if they weren’t toasted by the shot behind us, died in a whole lot of rapid fire ahead of us. Without even a ghost of their shields up, a railgun round could go through several ships, and we knew right where to aim. I drifted sideways into the ranks of their docks, up, down, and blew up whole lines of starfighters, and the pilots in them or waiting nearby, too.

The hangar was rapidly awash in an inferno of fusion bottles cooking off, which didn’t bother me in the slightest, but made it really hard on the crew below.

Interdiction was up, but that was fine. I launched two A-M mines to the fore and aft walls, sticking there with a five-second delay, and gunned it for the hangar doors.

The shields there were meant to keep atmosphere in, not ships. I tore through them and spun towards the bow of the ship, ignoring the bright lights and flames behind me as our Interdiction went up.

2...1...

Two shaped anti-matter charges rammed into normal matter, and blew fore and aft, and, well, pretty much everywhere.

The radiant fireball expanded behind me as it blew this Shadowmoth right in two, and was expanding very swiftly through the ship, ablation superstructure be damned with all those open hallways and things for the force and radiation to expand through unimpeded. The dark lines of the ship were suddenly blazing everywhere with radiant energy they were trying to throw off, and this Shadowmoth actually looked for a moment like an Elvar Monarch; a bit too much ink on the edges, but there was no saving it now.

I was just coming up on the bow when shutters snapped down, and the captain’s pinnace shot out from the ship like a bullet.

A bullet with a MF Gunboat on its tail.

He was probably not too happy that he didn’t get beyond my Interdiction range in time, and my tractor beams slapped onto him. This both slowed him and accelerated me, while the Toys all reconfigured themselves, aligned to forward firing, and began to maul his ship.

It was a completely defensive ship, meant to get away and out of range long enough to just shift away to Gloom and leave any pursuers behind, or at the very least enter a spatial fold and lose them.

He was in my Interdiction, so neither of those space-tearing things were going to happen. His displacement tech was top-notch, but I already had a tractor on him, and he didn’t have shears strong enough to break the lock.

Four Turrets and my main guns were on him, and there was no way whatsoever the gawking Darkwasps circling back could possibly get to him in time.

“Countess Rantha! I have information that could be of use to you!” came a sibilant voice over the coms. It held more than a trace of panic.

Yeah, I was absolutely sure he did. And if he lived after I blew his ship apart, I might think of actually dealing with him to see if it was worth it...

Well, no. The files put the deaths he was responsible for at over a trillion.

Breacher rounds went off in a tight cluster, and before the shields could close, clustered Sun Shots drove through it into the rear of his ship, exploding along the heavy laenwork, sending the whole ship streaming with superconducted energy colors in a marvelous display... but not nearly as bright as they needed to be, as the Ruk load went into his Quantum Field Core, and then space in front of me really lit up.

I shunted aside as the backblast shot in the direction of the open hole in the shields, veering off as the secondary explosion got even bigger, filled the ship with uncontrolled subatomic quantum fields that eroded all the atomic particle bonds around them, and the void flared with the same unwhite light that was burning steadily on the hull of the slowly tumbling Quilloceptra behind me.

Vivic was an add-on for every shot. None of the drow dying here today were going to get downloaded into a Vat for rebirth. It didn’t have to be huge, just enough to eat away any connections to life and send the souls on to their fate.

The fact vivus was burning on the Quilloceptra indicated that the ship was suffused with death energies, necropsychic power from the sacrifices of tens of billions of souls...

Huh, the frigate’s laenwork was burning with vivus, too...

A lock of my hair flicked open coms. “This is Countess Rantha,” I announced in perfect Elvar. “Don’t run, now. I am fucking going to kill you all.”

I spun Mom’s Flitter on its axis, past tactical range of the burning pinnace, and a touch of Harmonic Drive shunted all the forward momentum into an impossibly tight turn hitting 30g’s... after the compensator.

I raced back towards the burning, rupturing hull of the Quilloceptra, and the hundreds of Darkwasps currently streaking past it, and I began to Sing to them in exquisitely accented Elvar from high drowic society.

“Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, She comes... “

I couldn’t just deal death in the arena. Like an F-15 with a full missile load-out going after a World War II battlegroup, I headed for them, and wondered if one of those ships would be smart enough to run before I got to them...

Then I smiled, because I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen regardless...