I waited as the crystal formation hummed, preparing for contact on the far end.

A scientifically-precise metric arseload of PSP had been dumped into this thing to enable communication with a certain Throneworld in Ceasarspace. I didn’t have big hopes for this, but ah well.

The kids and their replacements had all been unhappy at having to give up on being Countess and Contessa, but now that the cat was out of the bag, there was no need to hide who I was, at the least. I liked Contessa better, anyways, as I hadn’t gotten it by being awarded a Writ and upgrading.

Finally the holograms flickered and resolved into a dozen old men, most of them bearing cybernetics, all of them looking around and then at me.

Their disapproval was evident. My disdain of them probably was as well, but I’ve been told I have an attitude problem towards twats trying to give me orders. Ah well...

I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t called them.

At last the Coronal Councilor took the first step. “Contessa Rantha. Thank you for attending this conference.”

“Your Grace,” I replied politely. “As I wasn’t sent an agenda, skip the pleasantries and go right to the meat of things. I’m in transit to another Xenosym Swarm thinking there’s a buffet in Worglerspace, and they don’t realize they are on the menu.”

I might have smiled slightly when they tried to hide their grimaces, and failed. Some enterprising Coronal maaaaay have leaked that video Sunhawk gave them, or it might have been copied a few thousand times and dispersed all over the Boole. Who knew?

Whatever, everyone and their mothers knew the Corunsuns were fighting the Xenosyms, and by the fact that our worlds weren’t screaming for mommy, doing quite the job, too.

Oh, and working with the Gardeners, too.

“Very well. What is your relationship with the Duke Corunsun?”

“Archduke Briggs would be my fiancé, colloquially known as Mah Big Fuzzy,” I replied smugly.

“Archduke?” promptly blurted out the High Perceptor of the Juris. “By what right does he claim such a title?!”

“Conquest,” I replied without batting an eye. “Of an entire Sector, including its Throneworld, by Acclaim. Also, it was a nice present for making Twenty.”

They stared, and then swallowed, almost in unison. A Twenty... how long had it been since there was a Twenty in the human race?

What did that portend for the Empire?

“Are you intending to secede from the Empire?” the Umbran Grand Duke asked in a sibilant whisper, staring daggers at me.

“If it were not obvious... yes. I’ve no Oaths to the Empire or the Emperor’s bones to uphold. The Emperor has a job to do, His Bones is not doing it, and if I have to work around Him to get humanity out of the hole He’s shat it into, that’s what I’m going to do.”

They all bristled, loyal Imperials that they were, all the vitriol and condemnation welling up, and then bursting out in a torrent of condemnation and scorn I tuned out with such indifference they might as well not have been speaking at all.

“My Peers,” the Grandfather of Assassins hissed, and all the others fell silent. “What have you done with the Assassins?” he asked me directly.

“Who? Do I look like a member of your hit-man’s club?” I replied affably.

“You deny you are the one that released and eliminated the Assassins from the Mountain?” he pressed directly.

“The Mountain, the Mountain... oh, right, that little brainwashing place on that uncharted star! Right, I remember now!” I snapped my fingers. “You were brainwashing Voids there, barring them from the Land, and if you didn’t like them, you were turning them into Deadshot ammunition, but only after killing off their families! I set a whole bunch of potential brainwashed dupes free to make their own decisions, sure enough, and it’s kinda strange, but after they took off those damn suits, not a single one of them decided to come back to you.” I leaned forward just so. “You go tell the bones on the throne that the Land hasn’t forgiven Him for what He did to Her favored sons.”

Which was all kinds of ominous, if you were Aware at a high enough level. And if the Emperor wasn’t listening in, I was a pikachu.

“What duty do you believe the Emperor has failed in?” the Grand Coronal interjected before anyone else could.

“Bringing down the Warp Gods, of course,” I sniffed. “He’s had the tool to do so right in front of Him for decades, and He’s been running from it, because, lich, yo, has no desire to actually die to win.”

“What? The Emperor can kill the Warp Gods?” the High Hierophant of the Cult of Man blurted out, his fanaticism deflected slightly.

“He’s been able to ever since that Rift opened,” I confirmed patiently.

“How is that possible?” the Grand Admiral of the Fleet blurted out, unable to contain his curiosity.

“On the far side of the Warp, stars are shining, open for the first time in over ten thousand years. Slowly, the souls trapped in the Warp are being sent on to their destinations... but no faster than new souls are flowing in.

“The Emperor has the power and the Faith necessary to reach out to all those souls in the Warp and lead them on to the afterlife... willing or not. That will instantly and horrifically cripple the Gods of the Warp, and the hereafter is not pleased with them at all. They will also be forced out of the transient plane that the Warp is, and brought to their proper places in the hereafter... small fish in a very big ocean.

“It’s right there, all the Emperor has to do is DO it, and it’s done.”

They stared at me, trying to not believe me, and finding it difficult. Decrying me was tantamount to lacking faith in the Emperor, and saying He couldn’t do what I had just claimed He could.

Tongue-tied didn’t suffice to describe their situation.

“He has reasons for not doing so at this time!” the Grand Hierophant sprang to his defense.

“Foremost being that He would have to die to do so. The other reason is the one I’m taking care of... the war against the Anti-Life. The dark matter entities in the Void, who I understand have swatted a couple of your fleets that came out of the Warp in some inconvenient places.” I was pure as driven snow, sure, sure.

“We... understand the Anti-Life have been... remarkably more active in human affairs than we thought before,” the Grand Inqusitor muttered in his sibilant voice.

“The Compact of the Black. The Xenosyms. The corruption of the Ruk’s Fallen. The Federation of the Way,” I ticked them off calmly. “Oh, and the Tekrons. Let’s not forget the Tekrons.”

They stared at me. “I’m sure you will now claim the Gatherers, the Kundi, and the Goblins are their agents too!” scoffed the High Lord General of the Empire, head of all those cute little marines running around.

“No, the Gatherers are the servants of the masters of the Galaxy one galactic purge ago, made to fight the Tekron. The Kundi are survivors of that purge, as are the Goblins. Actually the Goblins have survived three Purges, according to the records we plundered off the Tekron. Tough little buggers.”

“How did you get access to the Tekron’s data?” the Mechanist Grand High Preceptor demanded... in a cold, level electronic voice with all the emotion of fingernails on a blackboard.

“By killing all the Tekrons, of course.” Thundering silence. “Had some help from the God of the Machine. It was their time.”

Pin. Drop. Heheh! “You... wiped out the Tekrons?” the Grand Inquisitor demanded in disbelief.

“Within the Milky Way. There’s still crecheworlds in Canis Major and the Magellanic Clouds we haven’t gotten to yet. Kind of back-up locations. But there’s no more Tekrons in the Milky Way,” I affirmed him.

“I don’t suppose you would have all the locations of all these supposed Tekron bases you have cleared away,” he half-sneered.

“You’ve got better things to do than traipse all over the galaxy looking for them, but here’s seven in Imperial space you weren’t actively aware of, although it might be buried in some records somewhere that they are Forbidden Systems and so removed from the records for the safety of nobody.”

I waved up a hololist of coordinates, which all twelve men instantly memorized and sent off to be verified. The Mechanist was the first to confirm that the stars at those locations were definitely not in the Imperial Records, while the Umbran was the first to confirm the stars actually existed despite not being listed there. I could see the one glance at the other, and smiled slightly.

There was nothing to find in any of them. All the necrotech was vivisized, and the data long gone. The Great DM had fed pretty well on them, too.

“Do you think such minor accomplishments mean you can defy the might of the Empire?” the Grand Admiral huffed, but he might have lacked just a teensy bit of belief behind his words. He knew how terrifying a Tekron ship was, let alone a crecheworld!

“Given how ruthless and unscrupulous your kind are... absolutely! Shall I speak frankly?” I leaned back and didn’t wait for permission. “The only way you have of contesting us is if you abandon entire star clusters to the Xenosyms and the Anti-Life. Doing so will cost you three of the four remaining Sectors of the Empire, and you will lose the loyalty of every human alive for abandoning them if you do, because I will make damn sure every world in the Imperial Sector knows what you did.

“In the end, you won’t beat us. We are faster than you, stronger than you, and we aren’t reliant on the Warp to move around. You might be able to take out our lesser worlds and systems, but your Fleet is three thousand years out of date and going up against ships of TL 16 to 20.”

The Mechanist looked like he was going to shit a pink twinkie right through his respirator.

“Yes, you bucket of bolts, we have full access to the breadth of human tech. Nine Twenties work for Archduke Corunsun. I am myself a Nineteen.” All their breaths hissed in as they stared at me. The likelihood of them giving orders to me just dropped through the floor. “My sole job is to see to the extinguishing of the Anti-Life and their influence in this galaxy. As you might imagine, this is not a small remit, but Mah Fuzzy has been a bit busy having to clear out the nest of corruption called Khagan Sector recently, so what can I do? I fight xenosyms, arrange for them to become Gardener fertilizer, send the Gardeners off to the neighboring galaxies stripped entirely of biomatter by the Anti-Life so they can reseed them, and pinpoint the locations of Anti-Life so the Ruk can send them into a paragravity singularity for the benefit of everything that lives.” They hissed out again as I confirmed I was working with the Ruk, too.

“More to the point, I’m winning, as is Mah Fuzzy Briggs. That means the two of us are taking on two of the three great Xenosym Fleets, and winning. How is the Empire handling your one?”