Chương 237: [Nova Wars] Chapter 175+10

"Terrans found terrible places and explored them, and in their madness, told none of us of those horrible places, saving our sanity even as they smiled through cracked and bloody teeth with eyes that wished they were blind." - Sees the Night Sky Empty, Mantid Seer, 12, 238 TXE It was red. Even the red was red. Before that it was purple. There was nothing within that purple but a black edifice so terrifying that the words I will use to describe it are but a pale shadow of that terrible shadowless edifice.

I can bring forth my force lance from what you see as nothing because my force lance has always been thus. End of Line. - Meditations upon the Barrier War, Lancer First Class Drali'imna Vreltix, Free Telkan Press, 25 Post-Terran Emergence Imna moved into the bridge as soon as the doors opened. The atmosphere was already pumped out of the Nell, giving everything a needle sharp appearance as there wasn't any atmosphere or airborne debris to block the vision. Mister Enduring Hateful Code was in the main holotank.

His body was made up of shattered pieces of mirror that reflected different people screaming and doing things (some raked their faces with their nails, others cut at their flesh with razors, others pushed wires and metal shards through their skins, all of them screaming), broken glass with blood slicked edges and jagged points, shards of bright broken polished metal, and shattered pieces of stained glass. (Imna had once taken images of the Screaming One DS and put together the pieces of stained glass. They had formed a smiling you biped made up of swirling code. Mister Enduring had caught her and slagged her desktop computing functions and spent long minutes shrieking obscenities and threats at her)"Task Force Stygian Puddlejump is ready," Mister Enduring said as Imna sat down at the Assistant Navigation Officer. Captain Decken nodded.

"Excellent." The massive human was wearing the power armor that made it so he completely filled the Captain's Throne. Imna wore her combat armor. Across the back of her shoulders was written "PRINCESS" with a targeting reticle on the middle of her back. Below it was written "ONE SHOT AT THE CROWN". She had a crown etched into her helmet, above her visor, the warsteel marked like someone had taken an engraver to it. Hellspace had inscribed it on her armor. She had left it.

"Admiral Bellona is signaling. Shall I open communications before I kill you all?" Mister Chatty asked. The robot had "I CAN HEAR YOU..." stenciled on the right side of his skull-like head.

"Yes," Decken said. The holotank flickered as Mister Enduing jumped to the secondary one, reappearing the size of a fizzybrew can. For a moment, just a moment, a Terran of swirling code dressed in a Confederate Naval Uniform from time before. Then it exploded and Mister Enduring glared out from the shattered glass. In the main holotank Bellona appeared. Her uniform was stark, severe. There were six medals on the breast and the software in Imna's armor ID'd them after a long second.

Defense of Terra, Mantid War, The Imperium Upheaval, the Liberation of Alpha Centauri, The Dark Crusade of Light, The Second Precursor War. Her implant ID'd Bellona's uniform as the uniform of a Admiral of the Warsteel (Upper Decks) of the Terran Combined Military Authority. That wasn't what made Imna have to keep herself from recoiling. The uniform on one side was tattered and torn, exposing gray flesh that was blackened and burnt in places, torn to exposed meat in others. She could see two ribs.

Bellona's face was serene and bloodless, the purple fire in her eyes calm and serene, the blood from her slashed throat staining the torn high collar of the white turtleneck sweater. In one hand she held a crop, in the other a pistol. Imna wrestled with and managed to resist the urge to prostrate herself on the deck.

"Is your Task Force ready to make for the transit point?" Bellona asked in a voice that was somehow colder than the outside vacuum and more remote than the far stars.

"Affirmative, Admiral," Captain Decken said. Anyone else would have missed it, but Imna had been studying her shipmates for months. The tips of Decken's left hand fingers had trembled for a moment before he pressed them on the arm of the throne. I was copied from the neural engrams of a man who fought against the Mantid, the Combine, the Imperium, eventually Falling From Grace and joining the Dark Crusade, Imna remembered his voice.

"I will be making entry to realspace in a few minutes to guide you to our next location, Captain," Bellona said. The light in her eyes flickered, giving the impression of blinking.

"Prepare yourself." She vanished from the holotank.

"Coordinates received," Mister Enduring said.

"Adjusting heading."

"Ahead one tenth," Captain Decken said.

"Aye, Captain," Mister Smiley said from Navigation/Piloting. Imna swallowed several times. Long minutes passed.

"Status change!" Mister Goofy suddenly called out from his station. Imna looked over at the robot, clad in shipboard armor (because of course he was), who had raised up one hand even as he typed rapidly. In the navigation holotank an icon started to blink.

"Dark matter puddle forming, no apparent source! Eighteen thousand miles at twenty-two degrees and seventeen degrees up angle. Twenty-kilometers wide and expanding," Mister Jumpy stated.

"Get ready," Captain Decken said softly. Imna didn't ask why, she just checked her suit functions. Less than ten seconds later she found out why.

"GLORIE IS HERE!" roared out so loudly she could feel the console she sat at vibrate. It appeared on the foreward viewscreen as the inanimate screen screamed in agony, sparks shot from it, and thick iron chains dropped from behind the screen. A huge ship burst from the dark matter puddle. The prow was a skull with massive six barreled rotating cannons in its eyes. Burning red energy inside the gaped open jaws. The ship looked like bound and tortured males and females from dozens of species.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Imna knew, somehow, that all of them were species that had been swept aside by the massive guns of that huge ship. The guns bristled across the hull, many of them Imna knew, somehow, were live. The dark matter sprayed out, shredding into droplets that evaporated in the vacuum. The ship rose out of the dark matter at a sharp angle.

A large structure which reminded Imna of nothing less than a giant, warsteel constructed, twisted and tortured cathedral, burst from the dark matter puddle. The ship suddenly swung 'down' somehow, slamming into the dark matter, sending it spraying out in a pair of waves that the massive warship bisected. The aft end of the ship, with the great and terrible engines, exploded from the dark matter, sending it spraying for light seconds in a thin sheet of almost microscopic droplets.

Imna realized her bladder had let go just staring at the ship.

"Glorie has made realspace translation," Mister Enduring said. The hatred in his voice was gone and the light tremble made Imna's stomach knot because she knew what it was. Fear. Another point appeared on the system holotank.

"Coordinates from Glorie, Captain," Mister Enduring said.

"Steady as she goes. Maneuver for intercept on the coordinates," Captain Decken stated. The Glorie swung behind the Little Nell and the other small ships of the flotilla.

"Compensating for *Glorie'*s mass shadow," Mister Smiley stated.

"Understood," Captain Decken said. Mister Fumbles looked up from his gunnery console, his robotic skull lit by the lights inside the shipboard armor he was wearing.

"Dark matter spreading at target coordinates, Captain." Decken just nodded tightly.

"Intersection in four... three... two... one... contact," Mister Goofy stated. There was the suddenly feeling of impact, of plunging into something that was stifling hot, ice cold, and just no sensation all at the same time. Her nerves exploded in flame. Her skin was frozen and shattered. Her fur turned to acid and ran down her bones that had suddenly turned inside out. The forward bulkhead of the bridge suddenly turned purple. A wall of purple headed toward her.

She tried to scream but her throat filled with razors and barbed wire. The purple swept over her. Filled her. It did not pass her by but remained, filling everything. She fell forward and back and to the side and remained still as she fell through the five point restraint harness, slid free of her armor, and slammed onto the floor. It was purple. The light was purple and came from all around her, radiated from her, sufficed the air/not-air that she pulled into her now purple lungs.

A quark the size of her fist bounced off her hip like she'd been kicked by an angry Terran. She felt like her bone had shattered. Then the pain was forgotten.

She could feel her legs moving away but her body moved in a different direction, keep up with her feet, which were spreading in different directions and her eyeballs were turning backwards in sockets that were a foot away from her face and birds sang in one ear while the gurgling of the fish tank filled her other ear she could hear with her feet the whisper of grass as she ran and taste the taste of blue as it dripped from a fragmented second and her voice called out to her from a valley away where the red fern grew and her voice sounded out as it orbited around a drying red giant star and she could see herself laying on the floor on the ceiling against the wall against the hull as lavender pushed in all around her with light from everywhere and nowhere and light was a concept that did not exist here nor darkness for there was no beginning or end or eternity just the one moment that went on and on forward and back and to the sides There was a snap.

"Full entry has been achieved," Mister Smiley said, then chattered his jaws and emitted a burst of static for a split second. Imna was aware she was still strapped into the seat, still inside her armor. In the margin of her visor her armor informed her that the injected nanite were fixing the stroke damage and her vein rupture in her sinus. But it was all still purple. Because purple was all that could and would ever exist.

"Coordinates from Glorie," Mister Smiley said.

"Engage," Captain Decken said. Imna was impressed. She wasn't sure she could speak yet. Wasn't sure if her voice had come back. 0-0-0-0-0 Time had and had not passed in the never ending purple. Imna had seen shades of the purple, banding off in the distance to suggest a horizon that vanished when the concept itself failed in her mind. Stars that were born and died as she inhaled and exhaled.

"Object detected," Mister Goofy stated.

"Sensors cannot parse data."

"Understood," Captain Decken said. He inhaled deeply and exhaled, his armor looking like it was breathing with him to Imna's senses. She had been sitting in the chair forever. She had walked through the few passages of the Little Nell of Night a thousand times and wandered through corridors that had always existed and would never exist for a dozen lifetimes, tasting the passage of dead centuries in a place where there was only purple.

The screen, warped and twisted now, the edges of the casing looking like organic resin of some kind rather than high impact plasteel, came on. It showed only purple at first. Then the object loomed out of the dark shadowed deep indigo purple. Imna had seen pictures of cephalopods in school. It looked like a cephalopod made of black. Its construction and very presence was not purple which meant it was twisted and wrong.

At the end of each tentacle, and she could not count the tentacles that had always been there, was a great warship wrapped in clear resin the color of a lightness void. HAVE GREAT FEAR THE MIGHTY MO IS HERE echoed from far away, a cold whisper accompanied by the screams of stars slain in battle. It took a long moment for her mind and blood to unfreeze, but Imna realized that her first assumption, that it had come from the vast twisted cephalopod, was incorrect.

It had coming from one of the vast blobs of black smokey resin held by a tentacle, not the facility itself. From something imprisoned or stored within. Something vast, powerful, and terrible that would leave her praying that her eyes would be taken from her. One tentacle reached out, impossibly far away, uncurling and reaching out to wrap gently around the Little Nell.

Smaller tentacles peeled off of the thick tentacle made of metal hammered from night, each one wrapping around the supporting corvettes and drawing those ships close. One of the robots screamed a scream of binary static then straightened up, composing itself. Another touched its shoulder and it nodded. Imna understood. She had, for a moment, a brief flash of an image of a great beak crushing the ships and consuming them. The holotank flickered. Bellona stood there in uniform.

Her chin was lifted slightly as she stared downward with burning lavender eyes. Her braid gleamed with a slight red tint, as if there was an almost invisible coating of blood on the gold.

"Thou shalt need repairs, hull modification, a jumpcore addition, as well as engine upgrades and modifications," the Admiral said, her voice bubbly as her words pushed black blood from the wound on her neck. She paused a moment.

"This is no place for the likes of thee. The Dead Fleet does not welcome the living."

"What do you suggest, Admiral?" Decken asked.

"I shall send thee to a place that will succor thy very souls if not thou physical forms," the Admiral of the Black Fleet stated coldly.

"Understood, Admiral," Decken stated.

"I will be sending thee a shuttle. There is a place where thou can, at least, survive," Bellona stated.

"It should be docking soon and docked some time ago."

"Shuttle-Golf-Nineteen is docked at airlock four," Mister Goofy stated. Bellona pointed at the floor, where shattered glass was scattered.

"Take thy servant with thee. He will recover at the place I shall be sending thee. Take thy whole crew, Captain."

"As you command. Thank you for your consideration, Admiral," Decken said. Bellona just vanished. Imna unbuckled and got up, moving to the glass. She helped pick it all up and put each piece of top of a DS-Disaster Core. At each piece touching they dissolved as if they were derezzing from a video game. When it was done, Imna followed the Captain, the robots following her. The shuttle had pale faced Terran girls in stewardess uniforms who guided each robot and each of the living to a seat.

They buckled every person in. One moved to the front. The language she spoke made no sense and Imna was pretty sure there was some emojis somehow mixed in. She understood, though. It took forever. It took no time. It was 90 degrees west of two hours. It took till the second Tuesday of Friday of last week. The shuttle settled down. The stewardesses helped everyone to the door. The door opened up. The shuttle dissolved and Imna found herself falling for a split second. She landed on her hands and knees.

She was clad in the prisoner jumpsuit from the prison transport she had been shipped in. Her teeth were chattering from the cold of cryo, then she was panting from heat. There was no air, and for a moment she almost panicked, on her hands and knees on black cobblestones with mortar of black night. She looked up and saw off in the distance piece of black that should not be. A car the size of her pinky claw tumbled by.

A hydrogen atom the size of a pinhead hit just in front of her in a shower of sparks and tumbled off in another distance. She could see gradients of purple in a line that twisted and flowed like the horizon was a river of purple. She shuddered and pressed her forehead against the cobbles, the top of her muzzle pressed against the stone. A hand touched her.

"The discomfort shall pass, traveler," the voice said. It was a voice made up of a dozen other voices. Some whispering, some screaming, some male, some female, some both, some neither. All crammed together into a simple statement.

"Rise up and I will assist you inside," the voice said.

"End of Line."