Chương 53: Chapter 9 — The Final Straw

"When will you take the Tornok home world?" Dyen didn't talk to Cato much, he didn't talk to anyone much, but even he had heard of the incident in the Inner Worlds. It didn't much matter to him what had prompted the invasion of Sulean, but if Cato was going to move, he had damned well better move on Tornok.

"It's probably not going to be for a while." Cato's voice was strange as always, transmitted somehow through the fern plants the sisters had strewn in their wake.

"The more noise I make the harder everything gets, and thanks to our friend Muar, Tornok itself has a moon hovering just over the ocean now. No idea how I'm going to clean that mess up." Dyen sneered at the walls of his room, rented from one of the inns. He couldn't speak to Cato while inside his Estate, and he could easily afford the Bismuth-rank facilities. Which were more comfortable than his Estate anyway, since he had no interest in furnishing it with anything beyond the basics. There would be no point.

He had to bite his tongue on what he wanted to say, since Tornok deserved anything that came to it. The worse off it was, the better. But he knew that wouldn't move Cato, nor would it help Dyen with his goals. Instead he decisively closed the connection with Cato and scowled as he thought. It was obvious to him that Cato just had no interest in actually fulfilling the bargain. If there was some pressing reason to not engage with Tornok, such as not having any forces on the world, that would be one thing.

Dyen couldn't expect even Cato to simply magic up an invasion force that way. But from how quickly Cato had moved on Sulean, he had that capacity. It was just that he didn't think it worthwhile to spend on Dyen's behest. His tail lashed this way and that as he paced the confines of the small room, considering options. At Azoth, he was now powerful enough to actually deal with many of the Tornok Elites — but not all of them at once, and not with the protections that were layered over their Estates.

Not by himself, even with the advantages Cato had provided. Clearly, he needed to stir Cato into action, but nobody of power was ever stirred by mere words. No, he had to force Cato to move, and the only way that would happen would be if the System moved first. There wasn't much chance there was anyone smart enough on the System side to do it, so he'd have to give it a push.

Better, he knew that Cato didn't want to deal with more aggression from the System, wasn't ready for it, and anything that hurt Cato was all to the good — so long as it didn't compromise Dyen's own goals. Dyen had prepared for the day of reckoning, not content to leave things to chance and the goodwill of some foreign god. He had hoped that Cato would make good of his own accord, and take out all the chance and uncertainty in Dyen's revenge, but had never held much hope of that. Cato simply couldn't be trusted.

He left the inn, his movement Skill bringing him to the Assassin's Guild building in a single jaunt through the shadows, and entered the deceptively small room. His rank among the guild was displayed prominently on the far wall, and it amused him to see that he was fairly high up, among the elites, despite never actually caring much about the Guild. He had only checked in once during the entire decade and a bit that he had been on War-World Osk, but it had still tracked his actions.

Assassinations at Azoth seemed to carry quite a lot of weight. For the first time, Dyen posted something for sale at the information brokerage. Paying out the requisite number of tokens for the strongest possible anonymity was no problem; he had more than enough wealth now and not much use for it. Composing the message took a little bit of effort, but not much.

He made certain that he listed off as many of the Tornok-Clan's planets as he knew, but the main thing was alerting the powers that be about the ferns that Cato used to communicate. For proof, he included a memory crystal of Raine and Leese planting a few, from many years ago. He had even checked and found that many of them still existed, small harmless plants that seemed just slightly tougher than they should be, but very definitely Cato's work.

Finding all of them would be work for the gods and maybe other Azoths, something to keep Cato occupied after Dyen achieved his goals. But the point was that those plants marked Cato's influence, and there were dozens if not hundreds of worlds where they grew. Maybe all of them would be found but, even if they weren't, thanks to Dyen's tipoff they would start with those murderous rats and all their worlds. He hadn't seen any of the plants on Tornok itself, when he had arrived, but that was hardly a problem.

He had known where some were, after all, and moving them had been quite easy. Once the campaign started, Cato would be forced to deal with Tornok. And Dyen could finally stop making his wife wait for him to fulfill his oath.

"How's it going, you two?" Cato-Lekath asked the Sydean Lineage as they reappeared from the Inner Worlds for the first time after the Sulean Incident.

"Not bad!" Leese replied cheerfully, the pair walking through the high-rank capital of one of the newest worlds that had comms.

"The Inner Worlds are gorgeous, and we've only gotten in six or seven fights in the process. Nothing even lethal!" Cato mused over the idea of a few nonlethal fights being good, though he supposed it depended on the flavor of said fights. Friendly sparring had been a tradition for a very long time indeed, but the phrasing that Leese used made him think it was something less mutual. Still, if she was happy about it he wasn't going to complain.

"I have a list of some worlds that need immediate attention," he told them.

"I know you've already been to some of them, but there are some events going on that make me think I'll want to speed things up there. So launch ten or fifteen spears instead of just the one; an extra few hundred tons will gain us a couple months at the very least, and that might matter."

Unfortunately, with the Inner Worlds he had to deal with weeks or months of travel time to get to another celestial object and kick off the industrial acceleration, so even parallelizing the mechanics to the extreme had a lag time. It was the best solution he had to what politics demanded. He had gotten an admirably substantive précis of the internal dynamics from Mii-Es, and slowly building inquisitorial tide — as well as the opposition to it.

That sort of internal conflict could ultimately help Cato, but his immediate problem was that if something happened with the Inner worlds, he wasn't there in force. If anything, he was lucky that he actually had some five years of buildup over Sulean and could save everyone on the planet. If Meshan had decided not to cooperate, it would have been tough to accomplish much. As it was, crashing the System prior to the exterminatus had been a near thing — and unfortunately it might not be so possible in the future.

Thus far there had been a roughly three hour countdown to give people time to leave, but if that was cut down to only a few minutes, he just wouldn't have the time to apply any of his solutions. Then there was the absolute impossible mess of the actual Inner Worlds planets. They were nothing like the frontier planets, which could be generally described as normal, but with magical touches. Inner Worlds planets were chock full of magical geography that made them entirely unlike normal physics.

Magically deep oceans, craters and caves driving all the way to the planet's core; permanent storms that were more appropriate for gas giants than terrestrial planets; mountains or entire Ceres-sized moons hovering over land and sea. Even the most impressive infrastructural preparations could do nothing about the implications of such things without System support.

There was nothing in any of his archives or even his wildest imaginings that could catch twenty orders of magnitude worth of tonnage less than ten miles above the ground, or the tidal wave of trillions of tons of displaced water. Most of those planets would have to be mass-digitized.

For many of them, the collapse of fantastical features would be so unequivocally catastrophic that not a single scrap of the surface would remain intact, and that was ignoring the problems like a missing moon might bring to the planets. The System kept things like tides intact, but in a post-System milieu there was no such guiding force. Not only would he have to make new moons for such planets, he would have to alter orbits and spins, reconstruct continents and oceans, and reseed the biosphere from scratch.

The sort of planetary engineering that required several orders of magnitude more equipment than he had, and a long, long time to move the mind-boggling amounts of matter necessary. For the planets controlled by what he tentatively classed as the hostile gods, he had no idea how he was going to manage it. Worse, in the Inner Worlds there were many more people at Bismuth and Azoth, meaning that he couldn't just roll over the bulk of the populace with Chill Out and mindrippers.

He needed a lot more in the way of force concentration to be confident of managing anything with those worlds, and he wasn't sure how he was going to get it, but he couldn't even start without getting the industrial plants up and running.

"Not a problem," Raine replied, entirely businesslike.

"We do need to ask about joining a faction, though. It'll make things easier for us, but our patron is you, not any System Deity."

"I don't have any objection, if you've no qualms about dissembling," Cato told them thoughtfully.

"If possible, I'd like to invite or entice the high-rankers in the Inner Worlds and War Worlds over to my side, because I really don't want to kill them when the System goes down." Not to mention that each one he didn't have to fight was that much less force concentration he needed to employ.

"But I can't imagine there's any factions where that would work."

"Maybe not," Leese conceded.

"All the factions we've seen are associated with one group of World Deities or another."

"I'll check with Mii-Es. Perhaps there is an independent god in the Inner Worlds that can sponsor you or something." He hated having to deal with such things, but in a perfect world he could actually convince most of the System-gods and their followers away from the System itself. Many of them would only be interested in a System-like aestivation, where they could hunt and kill and adventure and level up, but that was fine. Simulated worlds couldn't hurt other people in the process.

In fact, one of the advantages of an aestivation over the System was that there were far fewer limitations. Limits were good in most places, as they created challenge and encouraged problem-solving, but if he was going to tempt the highest ranks to try something other than the System he needed to offer them more than they had — and the sort of elysian realms that tens of thousands of years of Summer Civilizations had made was a damned good offer.

He'd played games that were orders of magnitude more complex than the System, and more extreme. Games with higher dimensions, multiple realities, varieties of intersecting and overlapping magics, and inspirations from hundreds of fully realized cultures. In comparison, the System was underdeveloped. Simple.

Limited by its own insistence on imposing itself on base reality, rather than escaping into realms where limitations were only those of imagination — or entirely into the basement dimensions it seemed to be able to create at will.

"In fact, I'll drop you some supplies and propaganda as well, so you have something ready if you run across someone that you think can be enticed away. Might be a while, but it wouldn't hurt to start thinking about arguments now — if you can do it without getting targeted." The anonymity provided by Mii-Es help would only stand up to so much, but he also needed to start circulating some of the idea that there were other options to the highest ranks.

"I'm not sure we can use it now, but it won't hurt to have in reserve," Leese agreed. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Cato sent them a list of worlds where they could pick up the supplies, as well as uploading some of what his surveillance network had found among the inner worlds.

His support was limited, especially now that they were at a rank where they massively outclassed any force he was willing to bring to bear near any bystanders, but he could at least provide the names, faces, and relations of every individual his databases tracked. They headed off, and he returned to sorting through the intelligence he'd gotten from Sulean.

There had been a little more time to interrogate Meshan's Interface, and every Cato was interested in going over what had been revealed — although it still hadn't been able to elaborate on the secrets of reality editation. He was still quite happy to try and consider the implications of what internal processes had been exposed to his algorithms — until the other shoe dropped a week later.

If he didn't have powerful algorithms crunching away at the impossibly large volumes of data he got from all his surveillance and systems he would have missed the preamble and been totally blindsided. As it was, he got an inkling that something was happening when there was a statistical anomaly in the flow of high-ranking System folks near the Tornok-Clan held nexus to the Inner Worlds.

It wasn't much, but enough that various versions of him moved their readiness status up a few notches there, each Cato, Raine, and Leese deploying their own idiosyncratic solutions into a closer orbit. Other versions of Raine and Leese got back into their frames – some long-disused – and performed on-the-ground reconnaissance, but with the rank difference there was little they could really add to the orbital surveillance.

None of this was far beyond the general ebb and flow anyway; with near half a million worlds to cover there were plenty of instances where things moved beyond the statistical norm. What prompted all the alarms to go off was the near-simultaneous loss of over a hundred FernNet nodes. Some loss was expected; despite being hardy and engineered to live practically forever, the usual froth of an ecosystem meant that they'd been losing about a percent a year.

This kind of bulk die-off meant only one thing: they'd been made. He didn't know how, and it was just FernNet and not FungusNet, but it still sent versions of him on over a hundred worlds scrambling to self-destruct what was left. Worlds including Uriv and Ikent, where he very hastily sent out warnings to the respective deities even if he had already removed the offending organisms. Everything he engineered had built-in kill codes.

That was just standard for anything that wasn't a carefully designed part of the ecosystem, but just killing the plant wasn't enough to hide the evidence. Unlike his warframes, they didn't have all the engineering to turn into undifferentiated goo, so on all those worlds he, Leese, and Raine hastily targeted and delivered an antagonist organism with that engineering.

One of the many contingencies that had come up during years of wargaming, and maybe one they should have enacted earlier, but it had never seemed to be a problem. Unfortunately, that was only mitigating further damage. There were still over thirty worlds, starting with Tornok in the Inner Worlds and extending out into the frontier in a fan, where his presence had been very definitely compromised. The only question was whether that was enough to prompt an exterminatus on the worlds in question.

"I don't see why they wouldn't," Raine-Tornok observed.

"They have every other time. But that was a while ago."

"Except for the political elimination just recently," Cato said unhappily.

"So who knows how that affects things."

"If they're targeting us through FernNet, it can't be just political," Leese-Tornok pointed out.

"But it's not all the FernNet worlds. Just the Tornok main holdings."

"I'll send some inquiries out," Cato-Tornok said, hoping that Mii-Es was in a position to help him make sense of things. Or some version of him anyway, since on Tornok he might well be busy with other things. With framejack time, the System folks seemed to move slowly, but it was only an hour later that there was more movement.

No general quest appeared, so it seemed that all the high-rankers were operating on something more individual than the broad World Defense quests and evacuation orders that they were used to. On each of the worlds, between fifteen and twenty Azoths shot off into the atmosphere, and then kept going.

With the movement Skills that Azoths had available to them, hitting mach twenty or more wasn't a problem, and in no time at all the high-rank people had cleared the boundary Cato had established as the edge of System Space.

"Oh, damn," Cato said, though that was a weak protest as the tactical situation suddenly went wrong in all the worst ways. His particle beam weapons were enormous things, and while they covered the globe well enough, they did not have the ability to swivel around and track things leaving orbit. Swaths of communications and observation satellite went dead as the rankers passed by, mapping out rough bubbles of System-Space around each of the attackers of about five miles in diameter.

Melee distance, in space terms, but the Azoths didn't need to actually use any of their Skills to ruin Cato's infrastructure. They just needed to get near it.

"I got this," Raine said, utterly gleeful. Among infrastructure that Cato had built and set into orbit around Tornok proper was all the stuff that the Lineage had put together, support vessels and incubation facilities and the like, but it was all too much of a sprawl for him to keep track of. Besides, he trusted them to track their own assets, and since every version had their own manufactories and mines for their own products, even a vague statistical overview would mean nothing.

Thousands of fighters sprang to life from where they drifted in the deep black, over-sized fusion engines with a bare minimum of command-and-control hardware — and single-shot antimatter bullets. The particulars varied from world to world and Lineage to Lineage, as divergent versions of Raine had slightly different tastes in how to do things, but where Cato had been entirely focused on the ground situation, Raine had foreseen – and in fact hoped for – some need for actual dogfighting.

"Someone's been keeping up with their Fleet Commander," Cato said. He'd enjoyed the Ganymede-based media series himself – books, movies, games, and sims – but Raine had really taken to it and regularly picked one of the many titles when it was her turn to choose for movie nights.

"You know it," Raine cackled. Fusion light swarmed in the orbitals as she directed her ships at the incoming Azoths. Thousands versus tens seemed like an extreme disparity, but the Azoths were tough, evasive, and tiny targets, and the fighters didn't have the mass overhead to accelerate the antimatter to the high-cee velocities that god-poking guns could. The first of the fighters spat their rounds, but it was tough to hide fusion flame, even from the naked eye, so the Azoths were moving erratically already.

They well knew Cato's weapons came from the sky. Sharp white antimatter detonations bloomed and vanished in deep space where the payload destabilized, gamma radiation sleeting unpleasantly through the comms system in spatters of crackling static. None of them came from actual impacts, not even close, but the brilliant explosions made the Azoths move even faster, though it was still a static velocity.

The System's alteration to base reality amusingly put a speed cap on the System types that would not otherwise be the case; their reliance on Skills meant that they couldn't endlessly accelerate in a vacuum the way reaction drives could. Raine sent the fighters with expended munitions on suicide runs toward whichever Azoth was nearest. Hopefully to distract them from the rest of the fusion drives flaring off as Cato started to de-orbit his ready materiel.

He had to make an executive decision, and with such an attack, there was no way he'd be allowed a good second chance to actually take Tornok. It looked like Dyen was getting his wish after all. Cato sent a message off to wherever Dyen happened to be, letting him know about the invasion, and activated the few assets he had on Tornok's surface.

It was far more difficult sneaking even small deliveries of Bug Bombs in from orbit given how many high-rankers were around, considering the sheer breadth of their sensory abilities. Most of them had actually been smuggled in by the Sydean Lineage rather than dropped from orbit. He activated what Chill Out he had, though it only affected the lowest ranks — mostly servant races.

The very lassitude that Chill Out induced would have been a death sentence anyway, for those servants who had very strict masters, so he had no compunctions mindripping slaves living under such conditions. But even then, he wasn't sure to what extent he could properly follow up, since his orbital assets were over an hour away from re-entry. Even with fusion, maneuvering in space took time. Time that the System folks could use to wreck things.

The tactical display might make it seem like the orbitals were cluttered with equipment, but each vessel was generally hundreds or thousands of miles away from the next, scattered in the volume of a shell that englobed the planet. That was barely, barely, sufficient to keep the Azoths from being able to wreck swaths of machinery with their attacks. The first such attack happened simultaneously, across all the Azoths floating in the depths of space.

Enormous plumes of water, shards of earth, spears of metal, and razored thorns burst out at speeds rapid even compared to the hypersonic movement of the Azoths, and persisted even past the System-bubble they carried. In a way it didn't matter what the attacks were, for once they passed into base reality all they had was mass — but mass was all that mattered. Nor did they confine their attacks to Raine's fighters, and more was the pity.

Someone had spent the past ten years thinking of ways to properly combat Cato in space — almost certainly talking to Morvan — and they focused on swatting the relatively lightly-armored and cumbersome support craft. More, governed by base physics as they were, such materiel didn't have the robustness of the high-powered System entities the attacks were meant to target. The high-speed, high-mass impactors ripped right through his craft.

Most of them failed safe, but here and there a projectile got lucky and shattered the right part of the fusion system, focused engines going to uncontrolled explosions that flowered in the depths of space. Additional antimatter detonations played counterpoint, as Raine peppered the Azoths and reminded them that they couldn't ignore the fighters, either. Fighting at those distances was a long, drawn-out affair, not a close melee clash.

The Azoths had to close the distance in the immensity of vacuum, but when they did so there was no time for his ships to dodge the elemental attacks. During that advance, every movement they made had a sort of random-walk, some unpredictability to avoid Raine's weapons, which streaked invisibly across the void, showing that they had learned at least some lessons from Morvan and the other neohumans.

New stars bloomed around Tornok at the rate of perhaps one every thirty seconds, white and whiter as fusion and antimatter lost containment. Far below, the detonations were even visible on the day side of the planet, people looking up from cities and towns and wondering at the lights in the sky. Even if there wasn't a System-wide announcement, it was a conflict that could hardly be missed.

Cato scrambled for solutions, pinging other versions of himself, and Raine and Leese, to collaborate on additional answers to the Azoths while Raine-Tornok piloted the fighters. The first antimatter bullet hit one of the Azoths half by virtue of analysis and half by luck, engulfing his location in the actinic blaze of pure annihilation. Raine cheered, but when the sensors gained imagery of the area again, the Azoth was still alive.

Not in the greatest of shape, certainly, battered, scorched, and with a hole carved through him, but still moving. Before any follow-up projectiles could land, the Azoth did something that warped him away entirely, pulling out of the fight. Likely not for long, given the regenerative powers that Azoths had, but it established a baseline for what the antimatter pellets could do. Even if they couldn't kill with a single hit, and more was the pity, they could still take one of the attackers out of play.

It was a shame Raine hadn't managed to squeeze in something of a larger caliber, but the antimatter technology they had was strictly limited. It had always been somewhat of a novelty munition back on Sol; power-intensive to produce, difficult to store, and the hard radiation it created was not kind to bystanders. There had always been better options, but against System elites in deep space, it was all Raine had.

Cato was hazily aware of other, similar silent battles on the other worlds; even if the various versions of Raine had diverged significantly, they all shared an interest in fighter craft and most had similar fleets parked in orbit. He pinged all the other versions of himself to invest if they hadn't already, now that there actually were spacefaring elites to deal with. While Raine took care of that, he worked on inveigling the biomass he had from the Big Bad Bug Bombs into the lower-rank areas of the world.

There weren't all that many, and so far as he could tell most of the low-rank servant species were imported, though that wouldn't have been possible for the past decade or more. It didn't exactly break Cato's heart that the embargo on Coppers and Silvers had made it harder for the elites to import glorified slaves, but it was hard to say that people who fetched and carried rather than fought genuinely had a worse life.

The battle above seemed to be reflected in chaos below, as some of the higher-rank individuals abandoned their estates to whatever business they might have. Such unguarded areas were prime targets for Chill Out, and preparation for digitization. Something he could do without wiping the System from the area, but he didn't like the idea of holding onto a bunch of gestalts in stasis while their living counterparts continued existence down on the surface.

It was better than losing people entirely, though, so where he could, he extracted minds and sent them off to more distant servers, out of the chaos of the fighting. Here and there a meteorite streaked through the atmosphere from debris, accelerated into a ballistic trajectory by fusion detonations, but the orbitals were being subjected to a fast-growing Kessler Syndrome that would make any future operations an exercise in frustration. Not that there would be any future operations.

The tactics the Azoths demonstrated were unfortunately effective, adapting to Raine's forces in real time, and he didn't like it. If it weren't for the other neo-humans, it would have been a long time before the System types had begun addressing Cato's orbital infrastructure, but now that they had it made his goals so much more difficult. Cato didn't think they could win, but they could definitely make him lose.