I waited as the ships zipped back into the hangar, tractor teams settled them into their docking clamps with the precision of Tens with Skill Focus, while the Admiral stepped off-screen, looking a little bit harried and anxious.

Pirate raiders, yes. Undead ships, planet-eaters, demon princes, a mad emperor. Oh, and rebels who’d conquered half the galaxy and could fight at least the prior two off...

“Admiral, your answer?” I asked calmly, my hand raised to give the order to depart.

He hustled back into the holo, a weird mix of fear and relief on his face. “The Senate has their reservations,” my hand started to move, “but has agreed to concede to the Archduke Corunsun and swear fealty to Him.”

My hand rose back up. “Very good. A squadron of the Black Fleet will enter the system tomorrow. Be ready to receive it and prepared to swear your oaths. I don’t think you want to take too much time with the matter.”

“The Black Fleet?” He wasn’t a total idiot, and had seen the vids. “The-the xenosym are coming here?” His face went completely pasty.

“If you shoot at the Gardeners, they will eat all of you. Don’t shoot at them. They like the taste of xenosyms better. Spicier.”

“Y-yes, Your Grace.”

“If you are a smart man, you will ignore all the whisperers and be forthright and a loyal subordinate. We do not treat our people like assets to be Animated at a whim. Conniving opportunists who turn coat at the drop of a hat and try to take all sorts of advantage of situations of extreme peril... well, they do get what is coming to them.”

“Y-yes, Your Grace,” he agreed quickly.

“Now, I have sixteen billion people in Aquilaspace to save, so I will be taking my leave of you. Some preliminary instructions, deployment orders, and objectives to get into place will be coming in over the Boole to you soon. Take care, Admiral.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” he puffed, and my hand chopped. The holo was cut, and the Dojo, drifting outside of tactical range, instantly punched into Harmonic Drive. Doubtless he was watching it vanish instantly into the distance, and as his sensors lagged and we reached a mass window, the Tachyon Drive spun up, and left his sensor range far behind.

Fear, envy, relief, greed, worry. He wasn’t happy to change masters, nor eager. It was just something he had to do. However, he did want our technology, especially after seeing my ships and boats perform, and realizing that our ships really could do all the shit that the vids had broadcast.

Cellulocusts in his system, and he wasn’t to shoot at them. At this point it might be the last thing he wanted to do, as we were fighting his battles for him. Letting all of us fight was probably the mind of the Senate, ignoring the fact that of the four, we were the only ones they wanted to win.

Probably hoping we’d all kill one another and they could be one of those vying to pick up the pieces. Perhaps they weren’t familiar with their own planetary economics and didn’t realize how dependent they were on out-system raw materials.

Mmm. Well, there were changes coming. Not all the kids were waging war in personal combat now, especially the second generations. They had planets to claim and reform properly, and had plenty of experience by the older generations to draw on.

Callista and Tiberius were slated for Delta Aquaria, and actually were already on the planet, getting set up with the local G&G branches here and already getting certain production facilities set up, and massive personnel reviews were being processed.

There would be some violent opposition to their taking over, as the Cult of Humanity, the Underfamilies, the nobles, the merchant guilds, the Mentats, the Writ Nobles, and the remnants of the Mechanists were all going to have fanatics who would justify opposition to our takeover by all sorts of violent means.

The kids were looking forwards to the action. They had all that infantry and those armies to make use of, while all the Fleets were blowing the shit out of one another in the skies. The Coronals and the Umbrans were on our side, and the amount of terrorist activity coming in from pro-Warp fanatics and pro-Emperor nutcases was constant. The chain of command was a mess, trust was hard to come by, and now they were going to get a new ruler.

It promised to be quite exciting, lots of karma, and their recruits were raring to go.

I smiled slightly as I exited the heliosphere, hit the phlo there, and rocketed on to our next destination. Yeah, I could Gate, but that would leave me without an escape route I might need for at least twelve hours... so no, Tachyon Drive and Phlo-rifling it was just fine...

=============

“This is Commander Azure of the Rainbow Squadron of the Corunsun Navy. You are encroaching on system space that has sworn fealty to the Corunsun. Turn away, or make yourself an enemy of the Corunsun.”

Azure was smiling despite herself as she delivered the ultimatum. There was a full Sector Fleet equivalent of Warp ships entering Virgospace. The three inhabited planets and moons were all agri-worlds, and there was only a single cruiser here for pirate-chasing duties.

Sending that out there cheerfully as the other nine ships of her Gunboat squadron waited around her was definitely one of the funner things she’d had to do recently.

The reply wasn’t long in coming. There was a full battleship commanding this fleet, a multi-kilometer behemoth with overdone ornamentation honoring Klaw, complete with a skull three hundred meters tall shrouding the bridge, and a hazy bloody mist surrounding it. The prow was shaped like an axe, and could doubtless ram like one. The guns on the thing were as big as her Gunboat, shooting loads the size of ICBM’s, a true slugthrowing monster of the line, captured and fled to the Warp over five thousand years ago. Once it was the noble Axe of Tyrius, now it was the Reaver of Moons, with a long and horrendous record of world-slaughter to warm the heart of any genocidal maniac.

A normal person sending out such a message would have been completely ignored, as her squadron was certainly no threat to such a force being vomited out of a Hellportal, and could basically be treated as flies...

Except she had all the Intimidation Ranks working, and someone was listening, whether they wanted to or not.

She had the single most famous neo-fighter squadron in the Galaxy. Her ten ships had engaged every single hostile foe the Corunsuns had met, and had always been the first to be upgraded in Tech Level, her older ships passed down to those pilots rising after her.

They had never been beaten in an engagement, and they had taken down some very big and tough opponents, ambushers, raiders, skilled aces, fortified positions, traps, and counter-traps, massive numbers...

Forty capital ships? She quirked a deeper smile. No, they couldn’t do that, without a lot of luck and time. But she was only the lead squadron of the Corunsun Navy... she had a Navy behind her. If rather unconventional...

“Do you think we fear your meager pretender?” an inhuman voice strained through a voxer, a demon’s throat for that reverb, and inhuman vocal cords, all just to make it really nasty, snarled back defiantly through the coms.

She hit back with a hag’s laughter, and even demons would feel something crawl down their spines to hear that directed at them. “Oh, I hope you don’t. I’m looking forward to seeing you all die, but I vastly prefer you do it the next system over, in Minorisspace, where the Emperor has converted a world and is assembling new ships and crews. Strange that he is smart enough not to come here to this powderpuff of a system, and you’re not, but that just shows your relevant intelligence.” She laughed again before he could reply. “Our pretender controls three-quarters of the former Empire of Tellus. Exactly how much do you control? Five percent? Ten? No... six point three, according to our latest information, and those are pretty much all systems you firebombed to shit and of no use to anyone, even you, for a generation at least. Oh, except the Emperor’s been going around you and re-Animating all the dead on those worlds you’ve been burning to fuck.

“Yeah, brains you’ve got, no.”

They were still coming, and a few of the swifter ships were already taking potshots. Her Gunboats dodged leisurely, and without turning around, the Harmonic Drive kicked in and sent them moving backwards as fast as the Warped were coming.

“We will burn your pathetic worlds to ash, and then take the fight to the corpse and his slaves!”

“Creating more slaves for the Emperor! I like you guys, totally insane logic!” Azure replied winningly, letting her sapphire hair settle fully into data ports, and her Gunboat Yonder became a part of her extended nervous system. “So, I’m gonna be totally nuts here, too. Me and mine are gonna harass the shit out of you, swat your little flights of demented mosquitos out of the skies, and take out all your light support craft while we are at it, so that when you go fight the Emperor, you’ll just fucking lose, and end up being His slaves once again.”

It took a thought for all ten ships to peel away in all directions, and fade into cloaks the Warped couldn’t break without raising an actual Warp storm in this vicinity.

“You think you are a threat to me?!” was the overconfident and very ill-informed howl of a reply, but she was done speaking. After all, she was lying through her teeth.

The eighteen Gardeners soaking in a meal of sunlight to help digest the xenosym fleet they’d eaten recently, however, were something of a threat. From an AU away, they could concentrate a few million square miles of sunlight on those Warp ships with great precision, given a real-time spotter and clueless targets, and do it literally as long as the sun was shining.

Hey, all the agri-worlds were located within an AU of the sun, imagine that...

After all, they couldn’t have the Warped falling into slavery to the Emperor, even if they preferred to blow themselves up first.

Coordinated by Marks, some very hardened post-Ten gunners and pilots with all the investment in shooting and flying converged on their first target, a frigate running flank coverage, out of the firing arcs of the main guns of the other ships, and about to find out how just how nasty coordinated MF Gunboats with Sun-Shooting gunners could be to pilots who knew the internal layouts of their hulls like the back of their hands.

Yeah, the Possessed ships were waving tentacles around, or hands, and the cannons looked like muscular arms ending in holes, not smooth-bored muzzles, and the energy conduits and power cables had probably been moved around in the hulls like blood vessels.

That only made taking them apart all the more fun.

The Warped Fleet spit out a substantial portion of their fighter coverage. That was fine. The gunners could always use extra targets.

Annie-O’s Curseline were all Natural Gunners, and regularly cycled through exciting duties, although many of them preferred making Mechs and Walkers do wildly improbable things on terrestrial battlefields.

Still, being an MF Gunner was a job that had constant excitement, as right now there was literally no end to the stuff they could get involved in, while the land warfare stuff was basically best handled by lower Levels looking for Karma.

Her kids Feyali and Spriteli were Azure’s shooters right now; Fey taking care of top and bottom, Sprite starboard and port. Azure’s only obligation was forward firing and letting the bombs and missiles go, and of course that thing of minor importance: piloting the most ass-kicking fighting boat in the whole damn galaxy!

Mom’s Flitter need not apply to the ranking, of course. Azure had helped design it.

Her gunners had an interesting sideline of making children’s morning cartoon shows, and had successfully introduced over a hundred different variations of magical girl animations to a thousand different worlds over the last twenty years. They just so happened to only slightly exaggerate some of the stuff Tens could pull off; informed kids of the existence of Forsaken, if not exactly what they were (‘cause the Imperials didn’t need to know the details); planted the idea that relying on cybernetics was bad; and showed that you didn’t have to be a Psion to be a mindclaw and freaking awesome.

The number of young women who’d been led to G&G by those vids exceeded nine figures. Those things were freaking subversive!

Azure couldn’t help eavesdropping onto their next project, a superhero/horror mash-up with magical girls specializing in disciplines derived from emotions with specific colors. They were spinning out the villains and the subliminals in the art even as they started to pick off some of the overzealous psychos riding a demon-controlled fusion bottle in their direction, and Azure had to laugh as they started working on the dialogue...

The Glistening Fang grew very rapidly in size, and as the ten ships of the Rainbow Squadron came out of cloak and began to dance between the point defenses, the Gold Girl’s Courageous Catchline to the Black Fear Mechaman of, “We return your fear! TREMBLE!” inadvertently went out into greater Markspace... and coms...