The Galactic Concord had the most sophisticated communication grid that had ever existed. With more connections than there were neurons in a Terran brain, and significantly more bandwidth than there were in every single pre-Concord planetary networks combined, the Concord required multiple gods to oversee
just
the FTL signaling stations, let alone the sublight networks that webbed between FTL chokepoints, transforming every single solar system into an invisible web of thrumming commerce and culture.
In approximately twenty four hours after the Battle of Found, it was beginning to collapse.
The network had been built to weather storms. It was not built -- could never have been built -- to withstand the hammer blow after hammer blow that the Voidbringers were smashing into the galaxy. Three hours after Found was overwhelmed, the first battlefleets dropped out at sixteen different solar systems. The smaller systems were swept over and destroyed in minutes. The larger took hours. The Voidbringers worked, and their immense stellar-engineering projects spun stars apart, then sucked their hydrogen into vast foundries. They used E-space shiftgates to shunt that hydrogen into neighboring universes, where the laws of physics allowed for relatively easy mass-matter manipulation, then shunted the altered materials back to automated factories.
From those factories came more fleets.
More planetkillers.
More stellar engineering systems.
More death.
Roxi dropped from the orbit of a venusian world and onto the surface. Acid rain washed long her hull, while next to her, Sting staggered and stepped away from her, panting softly. The other ship had been repaired in a tearing hurry at an automat factory that had been still operating in Sellarinder, before the Voidbringer ships had arrived and the evacuation fleet had started to rush away as quickly as they could. The sky, before it had been shrouded by the clouds of the planet they were sheltering on, was already blazing with nearby supernova detonations as more iron bombs were chucked into more solar systems. But the font was too wide now for choke points to matter much -- even if the Voidbringers could only approach through narrow lanes of E-space, there were enough lanes that they could still bring more and more troops.
As it was, the nova were mostly trying, desperately, to sterilize as many Vodibringers as they could.
"Well, this is a pisser," Sting said, shaking her head.
"We have some hope," Roxi said.
"You gotta be shitting me," Sting said. She had been out cold for the majority of the past few hours -- the repairs had just gotten her to barely functional and then they'd needed to run before the sun had detonated from iron bombs. "How the fuck can we have any hope against this?" She threw out her arm.
[Simple,] Carcass said, projecting his moldy form into the smog-filled air of the nameless venusian. [We have tracked down the origin point of an extra-galactic ship, sent from the Andromeda galaxy, ahead of the Voidbringer wave. We know where it ended up in the galaxy. If there are any clues as to the origin of the Voidbringers, their goals-]
"Beyond xenocide," Sting said, her voice dark.
[Yes, beyond that,] Carcass said. [Then this ship would have it.]
"Great," Sting said. "Where is it?"
Roxi rubbed her hand along the back of her neck. "You're not going to believe this..." She paused. "Terra."
"You're shitting me," Sting said, then one of her crew -- her helms officer, Roxi thought -- popped up next to her, shimmering faintly.
[Terra!? As in homeworld!?] he asked, his Terran features twisting into an expression of pure shock. [No one lives on Terra anymore -- not since the anthropocene ended!]
[Well, that's just redundant,] Carcass said, dryly.
"We need to get to Terra," Roxi said.
"We need? We?" Sting gestured between them. "No, no,
we
need to get in contact with whatever is left of the Corps, and we have to..." She paused.
"Two starships aren't going to do shit against the storm out there," Roxi said. She paused, trying to...put the images she had seen over the past twenty four hours out of her head. But she couldn't help herself. For a moment, all she could see was Arlelan burning from orbit as blue-white flares roared across the surface of the planet as ground forces threw around their WMDs with wild abandon in the megacities that sprawled across the northern continents, desperately trying to slow down the Voidbringer ground forces. All she could think of was the death-screams of a billion people, reaching across the local net as people literally posted their final words to social media accounts as their orbital habitats were dragged from orbit by netwar attacks and smashed into their planetary surfaces. All she could hear was the hammering of the railgun batteries on the surface of Torphin, constructed along the desert flats by massed work teams, all to slow the Voidbringers down for less than fifteen minutes.
She shook herself and forced herself to sound calm. Focused. "But...if...this...
long shot
works, if we can find out what the Voidbringers are, what they want, then..."
"We can stop them before they eat the other half of the galaxy," Sting said, quietly.
The only sound between them was the driving sound of acid rain.
"If it helps, uh, I think most of our command structure is dead," Roxi said, nervously.
[Heh,] Heinlein added.
"You know what? It really fucking doesn't," Sting said, then held out her yellow and black hand. "Lets do it. Lets take this long shot."
Roxi took her hand.
The two of them took to orbit, leaving behind momentary ripples in the cloud cover of the Venusian. They came out to find that the Voidbringer armada earmarked for this system had arrived -- and this system wasn't even
populated
. The Voidbringers didn't care. In the distance, Roxi could see that the ships were already beginning to disassemble local planets to add material to the armada's construction efforts, the form of the superstructure that would rip the star apart and turn its mass into more building materials already starting to glint at the polar edges of the orb of pale white light that was the star -- when looked at through her vision filters.
[Lets get the hell out of here,] Hugh said. [Plotting a jump to Terra.]
[Make it a fast one,] Heinlein said.
[That will take more time-]
[Incoming!] K'iren shouted.
The Voidbringer armada might have been primarily in the inner system and the venusian that they were hiding out around was in orbit around an out system gas giant. But that didn't stop them from having picket forces. And when Voidbringers were on the march, a picket force was on par with most species' entire fleets. Dozens of frigates, backed up by a trio of battleships, came around the polar orbit of the gas giant, their long kinetics already coming to bear on the two starships. Sting and Roxi burned hard, turning their gentle elliptical into hyperbolics that curved back in on themselves, swinging their orbits retrograde.
That put the Venusian between them and the enemy ships.
