Admittedly, a good chunk of our strategy was hurry up and wait. We certainly weren’t going to be going in with much more than the equivalent of a system fleet. Since both forces had about the equivalent of Sector Fleets duking it out, we would definitely be minor players.

Our fleets were actually doing important work, not having a galaxy-sacrificing pissing match like these bastards.

Still, high TL ships are not just something you can completely ignore, so when we converged on the system, we were definitely noticed, as the Tribute was bigger than a battleship, if not bigger than the Dreadnoughts being coughed up by both sides, and of course, the vast floating space stations scattered around and staffed by millions of undead each.

That said, the first undead ships that made moves on us were tractored to a halt, and then simply blown out of the sky as the White Ships with us unloaded on them. A couple overeager Warped squadrons zipped on out to get involved with us... and were obliterated and vivified so fast that it became plain that unless they actually devoted a whole lot of numbers to overwhelming us, it wasn’t going to happen.

We didn’t initiate any fighting, nor did we get into threat range of anything, or bother to respond to any of their hails. The Angeltech was up full power, as were the psychic dampeners... and when you tacked on the Warp Interference, not even the Emperor was going to try and reach out and take control of someone.

There were a lot of eyes watching all the crews. Everyone was Marked, and if the Emperor came in with telepathic domination, it would be noticed instantly, and we’d see how He personally liked being on the receiving end of a few thousand Ten Psions in Metaconcert.

The Demon Princes had come raging in along the orbital plane... why, I had no idea. The strongest stations were in the orbital plane, why not come in from above or below?

Oh, right. Spectacle! Always the most important strategic consideration!

The ability of multiple ships to concentrate power on static defenses meant that even the most powerful Imperial defenses could be overwhelmed. Add bunches of demons to the mix, and that certainly sped matters up.

The greater maneuverability of the inertialess drive meant separating their fleet would be lethal anyways, and the stations couldn’t reinforce one another, so sticking together worked the best, despite their rivalries. They had also learned to use tractors to effectively lock the deathships into place at key moments, so the fight was turning into quite a scrap, with the Warp definitely holding the edge.

The Emperor was personally opening Gloom rifts into stations to send in more supplies and bodies to pile up against any boarding fights, but seemed to be having problems with the suicide troops the Warp was using.

Totally unwilling to let the Emperor Animate their dead, every single trooper and mecha self-destructed upon death. It wasn’t an area-effect thing, more like a localized burst of Warpflame that reduced them to ash or scrap... unless they were in the middle of a bunch of undead, in which case it could be quite large and quite destructive.

Deathtech had it out with Warptech, undead fought demons and the Possessed, literally a million starfighters and light cutters were zipping around trying to make themselves important, and we lagged behind, retreating if any substantial forces came our way, and obliterating anything less than substantial forces enthusiastically.

They couldn’t forget about us, but unless we intervened on the side of one or the other to swing a battle, we weren’t truly a threat to massed vessels in this size and quantity, both liberally equipped with Warp-enhanced psi or necropsionic power.

We watched, waited, followed.

------

Pluto’s planetary shield was breached by mass fire; a Planet-Cracker bored down through it to its core and blew off a Warp-Powered Antimatter explosion that sucked a quarter of the planet into the Warp, sending the rest tumbling in all directions.

That didn’t stop the undead from fighting, of course, but without the planetary shield, they were rapidly pummeled down by the Warp Fleet.

The Warp Fleet watched in some disbelief as we let their supply ships go right on by. They probably wanted us to make a move while they were dealing with the Deathship harassment, but we just sat back and watched.

Neptune’s Pacific Station, one of the mightiest space stations in Known Space, was brought down by ramming several supply ships loaded with enthusiastic Warp Marines, Fallen Legionnaires, and demons and their close personal friends into it, disgorging them into the main power cores. Once the first of them was compromised, the station was doomed as its shields went down, and it was blown apart without mercy.

The great Station, parts of it over ten thousand years old and dating back to humanity’s first steps into space, went tumbling into the gas giant below, burning in multi-spectra fires, Warped and Undead still shooting one another. The pressure of the planet’s atmosphere would eventually crush everything there, if the ever-increasing flames being set off with so much happy hydrogen and methane around didn’t roast them first.

Damn, that was a lot of durasteel we could have salvaged... la la la... recovery operation possible? Totally worth it if we could tractor it back up...

Wanting some entertainment, I was sure both the Emperor and His kids looked on in surprise as we began to sweep up messes, taking space debris and politely tossing it together in big lumps of blazing wrecks and leaking power cores. If it incidentally helped stranded crews start beating on one another, well, that certainly didn’t hurt anything, did it?

------

Saturn was on the other side of the system, with all its many moons and bases, but they’d sent all their ships out, so they weren’t missing out on anything.

Jupiter, now, Jupiter was quite a show.

Lots of moons, its own orbital belts, secret fortifications and weapons in place to punish any attackers, all sorts of cover... a great place to be inertialess.

The Warp Fleet mostly passed it by, leaving it for the lightest ships to create a fast-moving, explosive spectacle of hide-and-seek with the other light craft there, while the main fleet simply stood outside orbit, resupplying themselves while taunting the fortifications who couldn’t reach them with their geo-fixed weapons. If something big got chased out or discovered, they casually moved into position to pincer it and blow it away with minimal risk to themselves.

If they lost a hundred thousand starfighters and cutters, well, it was a big light and fireworks show as they zipped all over the place looking for stuff, exchanging fire, and dying in various pyrotechnic ways.

As for why the starfighters didn’t go after us, there were several hundred MF Gunboats cruising around our capital ships, backed up by several times their numbers of Crescents moving hither and yon in response to ship movements smoothly. Sending starfighters after the combination was like feeding fish into the maw of a very hungry shark.

Our pilots were well-informed that their purpose was deterrence, making intimidating shows of discipline and force, and eager responsiveness. Their readiness to fight and enthusiasm for it came across with every wave of deployments coming forth to tempt and tease and face down anything that wanted to come after them.

Did the Emperor have Heartsong on 24/7 to keep spirits up? Ah, mind-affecting shit like that didn’t help the undead, too bad, so sad... Choirs all across the galaxy were on all the time in series, letting everyone know the whole galaxy was with them...

-------

The Asteroid Belt could have been a great amount of fun, but given how much room there was between them, nobody took any defenses there all that seriously. The Warp Fleet reduced two Stations, Mantle and Lithos, to scrap, and easily cleared a path for themselves between the threat range of the others. Sure, the other stations could shoot missiles at them, but such things were easily detected and intercepted, and their accuracy and ability to punch Warp Shields simply wasn’t a significant threat.

There was heavy skirmishing as the Warped Fleet entered the Inner Ring, and went after Mars.

Mars had a full Orbital Ring, as it was the primary production center of the Sol System; close enough to get support from Tellus rapidly, but not close enough to be a direct threat if things went sideways and it rebelled.

It was mostly an ecumenopolis, as were all the Inner Worlds here, but it was designed to make things, not a total fortress world.

That said, it made weapons, and definitely had technology found nowhere else in the Empire. The Warped would have definitely liked to take it intact, but that was completely unnecessary. Getting rid of their long-range assets was basically enough, as well as crippling the Orbital Ring enough to make repairing the deathships was impossible.

I was sure the Madborgs with the Princes were salivating at the chance to raid the datacores of the Mechanists, but it would have to wait.

------

Tellus was obviously no threat to the Fleet, and it scornfully paraded past the helpless world below. A few million ground troops who couldn’t hold themselves back from the prospect of slaughter took dropships down, eager to find a lot of victims... completely ignoring the fact that those ‘victims’ had been warring with undead and necroborgs for damn near a decade now. Even if they set off a Warp Event or two, the people just took it and fought back with ruinous fury, and soon those troops were calling up that they’d found some truly worthy fighting below, and did anyone else want to come down and join in the ‘fun’? Maybe? Please?

Alas for them, the assault on the Imperial Palace was taking shape.

Mercury and Venus had long been converted into production facilities and fortresses for the Emperor, and indeed had hidden major necroic resources among them. Happily, neither had Orbital Rings, but they did have some hidden launchers able to shoot lots and lots of missiles, and planetary shielding.

The Emperor probably wasn’t too happy when the Veil tore open on Venus, and a major Warp Event spilled out all over the surface there. A lot of tech went haywire, a lot of necrotech fired up, and necroborgs and armies of mecha moved out into the acidic and either superheated or nearly-liquified atmosphere to shoot it out with tons of eager demons and Possessed coming straight out of the Warp.

The whole planet was soon lit up in a grand war of undead cyborgs and demonified living, brains-in-mechs going up against Possessed mechs, and the machine-covered landscape getting blasted happily apart by all concerned.

The Princes expeditiously took out Mercury by dumping two cargo carriers atop it with a rather immense amount of anti-matter inside them. They breached the shields with pure mass, crashed, spread their loads, and whole lot of matter went straight to energy with them.

The blast lit up the whole solar system, punched a hole a hundred miles deep into the small planet, and threw Mercury off its orbit as it shattered along its fault lines from the force of the blast. Needless to say, the undead forces and launch sites on it were no longer an issue after it began its fall into the sun.

That left the Imperial Palace, repopulated by undead from graveworlds across the Imperial Sector streaming into the place through Gloom Portals, all alone without planetary support, coasting there between the orbits of Tellus and Venus, its jagged bottom turned to the sun, and undead boiling over the mass there, having covered it in all manner of power generators and shielding.

Funny, it didn’t have much of a Spirit Host, certainly not enough to threaten the demon-Possessed ships of the Warp...