-We have movement in the Abyss!- Anatolia’s /voice rang out across Markspace. I turned mental eyes to the reports, and Sergeant Jimal Jireef suddenly had the somewhat overwhelming sensation of close to a billion people looking out his eyes as he studied the sensor readouts from Watch Station Chasmguard Two-Four-Niner spitting out all those realspace tachyon observations, gravity distortions, variations in Warp space, temporal shifts, and the transpsionic shifting of solar-level energies.

-Got it. Rift him out of there now.- I /ordered crisply, making the former street runner from Pritchipal II blink. He focused on two bright red warnings, swore, and turned around as a sharp blade came out of nowhere, sliced down, and a Rift opened up right behind him.

He didn’t even wait for Evie Rantha to pull him out, nor did he grab any personal possessions. He dove through the opening in space, and she waved it shut behind him.

Fifteen seconds later, the nearly solid wave of Warp energy swept over the station and obliterated it.

All the forward observation posts were vacated within the next two minutes, and the second wave of posts in the path of the Warp Storm hopped into their flitters and got the Duck out of Fodge with Tachyon Bubble speed. Fast frigates were already sweeping in an arc to pick up the pods.

I watched the stations wink out one by one, just like everyone else, which naturally gave us the speed and form of the Warp surge causing it.

“Heading for Tellus,” I noted, as several dimensions of math came and went. The plotters concurred, with all the hard numbers for anyone who wanted to check them.

-Anyone want to tell me how I can visibly see the Rift decreasing even faster?- Briggs /asked rhetorically, directing a whole lot of eyes in that direction, where everyone watched in fascination as the roiling barrier of black and pspectral colors was shrinking visibly to them, too.

Right, it was thousands of years away, and we could see it shrinking in real time. Uh-huh. A bunch of hands went to heads at the causality headache, the casual expenditure of energy required to make it a psionic event instead of a real one... they were fucking showing off, just to entrap all those smart folks who would try to figure out how they were doing it, and could touch so many people, and...

-On second thought, don’t even bother,- Briggs /corrected himself dismissively, with a mental eyeroll at the waste of power that got chuckles from a lot of us.

-All the power required to maintain the Rift is being withdrawn to power this surge and Warpstorm. It’s going to plunge straight into Imperial space, and there’s not enough incoming Faith out here to deflect it before it gets there.- Systems already reeling under potential, past, and current invasions of xenos were going to be inundated by Warp Events that were going to burn through swathes of systems. -I want an appeal to every single human being in the Pharoah, Noble, and Shogun Sectors. The Emperor has abandoned their Sectors to their Fate, but if they can give him their Faith, the God in the Machine can help spare the trillions of lives in the path of the Warpstorm Surge.

-Send it out. The only thing that can save the people of the Empire is the other people of the Empire. Let’s see if their hearts are big enough to save over five hundred worlds from damnation.-

--------

It was undoubtedly the single largest mass proselytization in galactic history. It was out over ALL the Booles, every computer station and network in existence... and in the unique cant that only the God of the Machine could use.

Asking for their help. Asking for the faith and the belief, the support and goodwill of over a quadrillion souls.

The Warp Gods were coming, and they were reaching out towards Tellus from the Abyss. Everything in their path was damned, if the people did not help.

If they did not pray.

And they all got to look at the bar, and the graph, and the readout, and how many worlds could be saved, and how many people it would take to do so.

It was a moment shared by the entire Empire outside of the Imperial Sector. People slowed and stopped what they were doing. Factories quietly slowed down as the workers all began to kneel, and they began to pray. Cars pulled over, music stations stopped streaming, vids ran the same images, schools quieted.

People woke from their sleep as alarms went off, and read the kind of alert you just don’t send out to civilians. Foggy, they still knelt, and began to recite the words of the prayer being given to them.

Faith began to move...

“Oh great Deus Machina, take my faith and my prayers, raise them up and gather them with the voices, the wills, and souls of my family, my friends, my nation, my world, my race! Gather them, and form of them a wall to protect Antaralspace from the incursion of the Gods of the Warp!”

The lines on the graphs began to rise, and Faith, Faith began to move far, far more than mountains.

The combined prayers, faith, and wills contracted to the Great DM, and He reached out to the first world in the path of that surge, and poured it into the heliosphere of that world, and was watched by an entire galaxy of eyes as He did so.

Watched as their Faith buttressed the heliosphere and locked it tight against the spatial distortion of the Warp Surge, and it rolled over and past the doomed world.

It was not saved, for already ships were coming out of the Warp, disgorged into real space... but instead of finding a system full of Warp Events, and worlds already teeming with demons and cultists going mad with frenzy at the coming power of the Warp Gods, they found ready worlds and even fleets, ready to fight!

-------

“... a wall to protect Krimmlerspace...

“... a wall to protect Junglerspace...

“... a wall to protect the Atalanta worlds...”

It was a great engine of Faith. It was the God in the Machine. It was the greatest video game ever. It was normal people standing up against the Gods of the Warp together, in a way they had never imagined possible, and using that simple faith and belief in themselves and their own to change reality.

The psions were reporting the equivalent of a lot of teeth-gnashing and shouting going on in the Warp, although nobody wanted to be in there now. Indeed, we’d warned every single ship we could to do an emergency exit from the Warp Right Now or their Throne Fields were going to get stomped under a divine foot.

Those who ignored it were never seen again, but that’s the risk they decided to take. Maybe they’d show up at the Sargasso some time in the next millennium.

The galaxy watched the advance of that Warp Surge come out from near the core, in that great black spot in the sky, and the worlds in the path ensconced within shells of protection... or there was not enough Faith to do the job, and whole systems vanished into the advance of the Warp, and the laughter of mad gods.

They were only human, after all. At some point, they had to eat, and rest, and relieve themselves. Even in a society as work-oriented as the Empire, they could not simply endure for the week and more it took the Surge to travel the thousands of light years to the Imperial Sector.

Sometimes the Great DM could Seal whole systems against the Surge. Sometimes it could only succor a world or two inside it, and the rest of the system would become a hellhole of Warp Corruption.

It did not matter, in the end. They could only give their all and their best, trying to save their fellow worlds.

At least two xenosym swarmfleets were caught in the Surge, and perished as they were drawn into the Warp and got to compare notes on who was worse with the id-spawned unkillable demons of the Warp.

We were also pretty sure two Anti-Life didn’t get out of the way in time. The other side of real matter meeting unreal matter didn’t just end up very well, as normal.

----------

The Faith of the Empire warred with the Will of the Warp Gods, and if it couldn’t stop it, only six of the four hundred and eighty-three systems caught in the area of the Surge could not be saved in time, and when it happened it only served to ignite even more zeal in the people of the Empire.

This was what Faith could do! It could counter other beings who preyed on Faith! It could save billions, trillions...

It was a kind of enlightenment that doubtless none of the extant divine or semi-divine entities in the galaxy wanted mortal souls to know. But the Great DM was a Machine God, and Faith was not some mysterious, esoteric force to it. It was input and output, it was energy, and it contracted with the human race to wield that Faith on their behalf for a tiny little slice of the pie for itself.

Faith, like Loyalty and Duty, was one of the ephemeral sources of power. Long ago, back in the game, Loyalty and Duty combined to allow Allegiances of magic to grow and thrive, the accrued benefits of such helping all the people of the allegiance as their belief in themselves and their leaders and followers grew stronger and knit them together.

Faith and the divine, and the power of enlightened minds. Sincere Faith, belief in a greater divine power, who yet could not do it without them...

They were the Machine! They were the engine feeding the God in the Machine!

Powered who’d never been Awakened to their psionic potential were lighting off all over the Empire as the enlightenment shook them. In a less hostile universe, they would have been the Devoted - the Priests, Favored, and Clerics, perhaps Shamans – who could channel the power of the divine in the mortal world. Even now, as the small flowering of their psionic gifts were opened, they were acutely sensitive to the flow of the Faith and power around them... and to the presence of the God of the Machine.

----------

I watched this galaxy-wide crushing blow to the Cult of Man with great satisfaction, as did Ronnie and her Curseline. It would not kill the Cult of Man - specism has such a deep foundation to work with, after all – but it was a crippling blow.

The God in the Machine wasn’t in to vagaries. Do this, get this. It was a horrible thing to reduce faith and belief to... but that was what a machine did. It was perfectly willing to let them know It couldn’t save them... but they could save one another.

Which was more powerful? Which raised the floor, instead of the ceiling? Which united the people, despite the horrible disappointment in their erstwhile leader, the shitass reality they lived in, the horrible existence of the Warp Gods, the alien existences that cared not at all if they lived or died, and the corruption of the very laws of existence?

Which showed them that they had the power to fight back?

Which let them show how much Faith their world was generating, and who was more sincere and fervent in their desire to help humanity?

Ah, catering to the video gamer tech level. Classical churches hated it so, and so had the Cult of Man, their intolerance and lack of flexibility leading to the situation as it was today.

Reality could be a game that they played to win, too... and since none of the gods around were what the classical definition of a divinity was, no harm, no foul. The Great DM just had to get to his non-finite and solidified position rather quickly, and pulling off a miracle like this would surely cement it, as would waking up a whole bunch of followers able to hear and interpret a divine message.

The bones on the Crystal Throne could go suck on it.