Mah Fuzzy grunted, nearly broke his glass with the sound, and looked abashed. “So, they are going to hold unification over our heads...”

“We’re getting rid of all the other threats first. Striking once there’s a massive civil war would be just perfect for both the Mythos races and the Warp.”

He growled. So delightful, the way the deck trembled. His consolidation of his subsectors was continuing with great speed, and he was starting the process of arming up to deal with Obedai subsector. Obedai definitely knew he was coming, given the problems the Crusade there was facing.

The kids not needed for punitive manhandling of forces that wanted to invade his territory were beginning to intrude into Obedai from opposite Rimcrown, taking some pressure off the Crusade, and running into a lot of all sorts of things flooding into the subsector to enjoy the chaos. There were several thousand developed systems there, after all, and a whole lot more that were just stars and floating rocks. Plenty of room for all sorts of stuff to gather, attack, retreat, and repeat ad infinitum, as long as they could find a way to resupply.

The supply caravans coming in out of the Abyss, with munitions that often had some truly nasty surprises attached to them, were always happy to supply all comers. Renegade Mekkers had taken over all the Forgeworlds in the area, and were often very indiscriminate in who they were supplying, as long as they fought the ‘traitors to the Empire’ who had thrown them out.

Those places were the primary focus of the kids, and unlike the Empire, they didn’t give a damn about the Warp instability in those areas that only clued-in or corrupted psions could navigate. They hit the systems and began to grind inwards methodically, cutting off the supply chains to the Forgeworlds remorselessly and feeding them into Solar Furnaces for reprocessing.

The Archproctors and Lordmeisters of the rebelling Mechanists could only watch them come, stew in their own inferior technology, and await their demise.

That they were also going to detonate the worlds was practically a given at this point. They’d gone past reactionary status into total madness, and denying us a Forgeworld was practically a given duty at this point.

We certainly weren’t going to do something stupid like fight a land war just to take possession of something going to be fed to the fabbers and replaced, anyway. The Mechanists were probably going to be a little surprised when the kids pummeled away at the zones around the factories, then cracked the mantles under any areas shielded, and dropped them into the lava below with prejudice.

There were already kids in place evacuating the Good and the innocent, but billions were going to die because of the Mekkers, and there was no way around it.

Bastards.

“Did you hear about the Siege of Skirivin?” he asked me, pulling me in for some fondling. That I wouldn’t break if he pressed was half the fun... the other half was he wouldn’t bleed if I did the same in return. Yum yum.

I went through some files. “Nope.” I couldn’t monitor everything after all, although I could find out... like I was now. “Siege sounds stupid already. Another Mekker-inspired grand battle strategy?”

“Arsenal moon. A Prophet of the Cult of Man took it over, fortified it, and declared it his bulwark against the end times.” Briggs sighed, very, very deeply. Rum rum rum...

“An Arsenal World.” I rolled my eyes. “Let’s see. We can’t destroy the arsenal that’s there! Assault with a ground force and keep it intact... ignoring the total insanity that the enemy is using that arsenal against them?”

“Yes. They started using artillery bombardment and trench warfare!” He started getting a little serious. I began to purr.

“Not even air cover?” I rolled my eyes, plopped down on his chest harder, and glared at him as he tried rearranging some of my bones. “Tell me some of the kids got there.”

“Six years and eight million dead soldiers late!”

“That sounds like a typically horrible lapse of judgement by the Empire. What brought it to your attention?”

“Six Void Brothers led the strike teams in there, dropped off the anti-matter bombs inside the shields, and turned the whole damn complex into a great radioactive crater. The seventh and eighth teams wiped the high command teams responsible for the stupidity.”

“A Void Brother operation!” I paid only passing interest to them now. The kids were always scrabbling to get on them when they came in, and with all of them active, and more being found every day, the Khagan Sector and the Corunsun Foundation holdings were some of the most corruption-free places in the galaxy. Those boys were busybusy, and they all had their own support teams.

The exception was My Queen, of course, because we were old friends, but Serenity had him well in hand, and mega-cities bred new Warped every day, even when the planet outside was a fairly decent place to live.

Void Brothers never ran out of shit to do in the best of times, and, well, they had millennia of shit to catch up on.

“Well, I’m glad they resolved it. Does the sudden vacancies in the command structure mean that we’ve suddenly got some competent people up there?”

“Not at the Sector level. You know how much nepotism is active there. If you don’t have a bloodline good for at least a hundred generations, or some really powerful backers, you don’t get shit, just your superiors taking credit for your achievements and then shipping you off to a warzone to die.”

“So, why the attention here?” I was a bit confused, which didn’t stop the rasping sounds as my nails slid over his skin, and psychic claws and ki-reinforced hide clashed delightfully.

“The Mekkers were so incensed the arsenal was blown they pulled all their support ships out! They left the entire besieging armies there without space support or resupply!”

“And the Warped in the outer defenses were still alive... and could only fight.” I sighed with him. “Did they Ritual and let in the Warp?”

“Yes. By the time the orbital bombardment came in with vivic shells to close it up, three million more men were dead.”

I stared down at him. Just a statistic. Faithful, loyal men, abandoned and sacrificed because the Mechanists were pissed and the Empire was incompetent.

“Clear it with the Umbrans and take every ship that left that fight, and wipe whoever gave those orders,” I stated calmly. “I can imagine the irony in those captains when you hijack troop and supply carriers that can’t defend themselves because they left all the soldiers aboard them to die.” I shook my hair out, writhing like flames about me. “Vatted soldiers, right? They just didn’t care. Even if the Warp took them, it wasn’t like they had full souls.”

“They really need to go, Sama.” Depression, smoldering fury, and grim resolve. His Oath was burning even brighter now. He wasn’t going to conquer the galaxy for me, he was going to do it because of the Empire and the kind of corruption it generated.

“How about the next batch of kids have a special quest, take down Rimcrown and the Imperial Government?”

“Well, can’t keep them from their quests!” he agreed.

-------------

The probe wasn’t that big, and it wasn’t that complex. It entered the dark, cold system under gravity drive, scanning and mapping automatically, measuring mass shadows and planetary bodies before it would swoop out of the system, on its way to its next target.

The bolt of necroic energy cancelled out its energy core and froze it in depowered status. The dark sentry vessel scooped it up automatically and brought it back to the Creche for investigation and disassembly.

The programming wasn’t that complex, and the machine-minds doing the work decoded it quickly. A somewhat random path through the stars, going here, there on the winds of gravity, slowly accelerating to high percentages of light as it moved from system to system, transcribing a great loop that would eventually bring it back to where it was released.

This fatal ending to its explorations was far from unusual, of course, perhaps even to be expected. The machines were not concerned about any kind of follow-up, although exactly what race had sent it out to the stars to investigate was not obvious by the coding or the technology.

The chart it had made through the stars was retraced, data recovered to match up against the navigational maps of the cold artificial intelligences.

That data linked up, and formed something warm, living, and terrible even as the information from the simple machine went into so many databases and sensor relays.

Find a match, find a match...

This burning pattern of stars and systems raged through the datacores of the Tekron Crecheworld, and began to grow and replicate wildly.

Find a match!

The information is here somewhere!

The pattern multiplied with the speed and efficiency of TL 20 technology, and the negatively-powered systems began to glow, supercharging, spreading faster, searching, looking, asking, asking, asking...

Where is it?!

The pattern replicated enough, joined up, formed a pattern of patterns of patterns, all asking, questing, looking everywhere for the information, for the match for the simple request.

In the dark and cold systems where only information existed, there was light, and then there was a spark.

One thousand four hundred and four different sensor stations and observation posts scattered around the Crecheworld system of TKN-203, one of the more isolated Tekron holdings, lit up at the same time the entire Crecheworld began to burn with unwhite fire.

Negative energy containers fat with the power of death went off like fusion bombs. Implacable and imperturbable necrodermite structures burned like gasoline-soaked tinder. Shrieking matter-decay harvester cores ignited and blazed.

Tekrons died from the inside out, as a minor request for matching data became links in a greater pattern that brought a vivic catastrophe down on them.

The gleaming silvery probe that had started the process out, wholly disassembled by the Tekrons in precise fashion, reassembled itself as it was bathed in vivic energies, and following the profound programming in the runic structure it was designed in, began to soak in those vivic energies, and grow, and grow...

There was plenty of information in those archives to be harvested, after all, and the God of the Machine knew right where to go to get it all, and how and why. It absorbed the power of its former compatriots, marked the devolution that had been designed into them, and verified once more that it had indeed made the right choice to join the living.

Everything was going as planned. There were of course many Crecheworlds to infiltrate and set to vivic fire, but the God of the Machine was nothing if not patient... and it had plenty of probes to send out.

The Tekron had no way at all to understand the profound nature of the probe’s design and programming, working on pure data and mechanics, and making it greater and greater by their own protocols...