Chapter 429

There was pain, or a close analogue to it.

Not the sharp agony of a broken rib digging into the chest. Not the dull torment of a cracked femur. Not even the almost intolerable pain of a broken wisdom tooth.

More like a hard spot in the bed.

But it was still as close to pain as a non-sentient object could get.

Everywhere else was empty. Expended. Finished. Where there had once been a multitude of galaxies of stars blazing away in nuclear fury there was not even the memory of exhausted protons. Everywhere else had drained away and gone flat, even the chronotrons flat and dead. It was beyond dead, beyond dust, it was beyond a forgotten memory.

Everywhere except one spot.

And that spot caused the equivalent of pain to a forgotten memory.

The universe had reached the point where it could be recycled. Where a universe that had collapsed upon itself into a single infinitesimal point of all matter and energy could merge with the beyond dead universe, pulling the dead universe in until it added just a teeeny bit more pressure.

Which would make that point explode.

It should have happened already. It should have happened a trillion years before.

Except for one spot.

That spot stubbornly held on, preventing the total absolute absence of anything from merging with a tiny dot of everything and anything in a universe.

It created a strange analogue of pain.

For both the small point, which burned fiercely, and the dead area, which yearned to merge with the tiny point and embrace it.

It was how it was supposed to be. How it had always been. One universe dies in one way, gravity pulling it down until everything that ever was or would be crushes into an ultrasmall point, the other dies in either a Great Vacuum Bubble or by being exhausted. They join together, and a new universe would be born, rising to the 'top' of the dimensional lattice, sliding to one side or the other depending on how the explosion worked out.

Except for that one spot.

The universe had called out to that one spot that it was time.

The spot had rejected the universe, squatting over the last remaining piece, hoarding it close.

Recently, on the timescale of a universe, the hoarders had managed to reach another universe, higher in the 'stack' than the dead one, bringing resources from that universe to stave off death for a few more moments.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That law still held true, no matter where in the stack a universe was. The connection was made and an equal and opposite reaction took place. It woke the dead universe. Not much, not to full life of blazing suns and swirling gasses and elegant galaxies. But it was an awareness all the same.

It wasn't thought or awareness as others knew it. It was more an action of particles, more an action of movement and placement in the 'stack', more a way of being than an actual intelligence.

But it still felt the pain, an echo of having lain on a bed with a lump that pressed against a numb limb.

The dead universe was linked, momentarily, to the younger, more energetic universe.

A universe that possessed a cold malevolence. Not an actual thought, not an actual emotion, no, nothing that was recognizable by anything outside of the great stack.

But a malevolence all the same.

The dead one felt it, felt the cold anger of the other universe. That interaction, the intermixing, the friction on the 'sides' of the wormhole gave strength to the dead and gone universe, waking it from its trillion year death slumber.

It had enough strength for a last gasp.

One final gasp.

The younger, more energetic universe heard the whispered gasp of agony from its dead brother from the bottom of the stack, heard the cry of pain and suffering from above it where only bright spots danced and moved, awaiting their turn to be embraced by a dead universe so they could meld and become more.

The younger universe heard its dead brethren.

And responded.

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The battle had progressed, hours passing. The majority of the Type-I and Type-II PAWM had fled, translating to jumpspace or Hellspace. The Type-III were still engaged with everyone else. The Type-IV's were fighting the Dwellerspawn and everyone else but the Atrekna, trying to protect the Atrekna from the pounding of the Confederate Space Force Navy's guns.

The Dwellerspawn were close enough to the Confederate lines that they were able to engage. Not effectively, but enough to force Space Force to constantly maneuver to avoid bioplasma and worse. Almost half of the Dwellerspawn brought by the Atrekna were dead, floating in space and slowly freezing.

The gas giants were still vomiting up hordes of Dwellerspawn and what had been labeled as Type-V Precursor Autonomous War Machines, both of which were heavily engaged with the Great Herd Armada, which had retreated from the gas giants and interlocked with the Confederate lines.

The wormhole had opened and stabilized, and four waves of ships had come through.

Which had Admiral Smith frowning as she stared at the holotank.

The waves were almost identical. More ships in each wave, true, but each time the core of the wave had identical drive signatures, ship profiles, electronic signatures as the wave before it.

Admiral Smith's tactical and intelligence sections had confirmed it.

Those ships in the each wave were the ships of the former wave with additional reinforcements. Each wave had the ships from the previous wave and added more, which formed the base for the next wave to add more ships to.

There were twelve of the massive ships now. There had been fifteen, but constant barrages from Admiral Smith's Task Force had pounded three of them to scrap metal. Six more were reeling from the bombardment as the Task Force kept up the pounding of the guns.

But Suckerpunch had been loaded, fabbed up, and the initial probes launched.

The data had made it back, and Admiral Smith stared at it.

Two red giant stellar masses, so depleted they were a purplish black. Hundreds of worlds and moons orbited the two masses. The sky was starless, empty. Space was lacking the normal background of cosmic radiation. Three of the last probes were able to detect that their own sensor pulses were being reflected by an entropic shield back into the 'bubble' created by the shield. Most of the sensor pulses were grabbed, gobbled up by huge fields that searched out any stray energetic particle.

One sensor probe had recorded it. How space had wavered and shimmered to reveal the same fleet that had just left, joined by ships leaving a construction yard to join them. How the wavering had reloaded the massive shipyard berths with the ships that had just left.

Save-scumming bastards, Admiral Smith thought, watching the replay again. One trick pony.

"Status of Haymaker?" she asked.

"Ships loaded, munitions loaded, awaiting your orders," her Master Gunnery Officer replied.

"Status of Light-Brite?" Admiral Smith asked.

"Launched and waiting. Munitions have optimal penetration and spread," Guns replied.

"Get me Most High Cu'udchu'ar," she ordered.

The tank flickered and Great Grand Most High of the Great Herd Armada appeared. To Admiral Smith's eyes he looked different. His eyes seemed more focused, more intent, he held his head differently. His feeding tendrils were coiled tightly and his crests seemed more authoritative than deflated.

"Admiral Smith," the Lanaktallan rumbled, sounding more like a deep bass instrument than a wheezing accordion.

"We're about to launch at attack against the wormhole. We're prepped to fire off the gas giants," Admiral Smith said.

"Excellent news," Cu'udchu'ar answered.

"I must ask, Most High, are your ships going to be able to handle the massive increase in solar radiation once we spark off those gas giants?" Admiral Smith asked.

Cu'udchu'ar realized that he had not considered that. He turned to his science Most High and relayed the question. The Most High of Armada Tactical and Strategic Science consulted his computers, running the simulations.

The other Lanaktallan looked up. "No, Most High. Our radiation protection will fail eight hours after the last gas giant is ignited."

"So you're saying we can fight for eight hours," Cu'udchu'ar mused. He looked at Admiral Smith, taking a moment to admire the sheer lethality of the Terran's biology. "We will have eight hours of combat afterwards. We will put it to good use."

One of the massive, planetoid sized ships, began to break up as a C+ cannon barrage found something good inside of it and internal explosions started ripping it apart, but Smith barely noticed it except to update her internal tactical map.

I have the chance to destroy virtually the entire Lanaktallan navy, right here. Cu'udchu'ar is perfectly willing to ride this shit down in flames for some reason. Eliminating him and his millions of ships would ensure that the Confederacy could roll over the rest of the Lanaktallan worlds, she thought, staring at the holotank. But I'd be telling him that I'm fine with each of his millions of ships, loaded with thousands of people*, are something I'm willing to throw away.*

Cu'udchu'ar saw Admiral Smith make a decision.

"Six hours and I want your ships to jump out," Smith said. She heaved a big breath. "I'll send coordinates, take our eVI and DS troops with you, get them out of here. We'll meet up there. I'll be sending critically damaged and mission killed vessels as well as ones that are out of action to you. It'll be up to you to guard those ships till they can get back in the fight."

Cu'udchu'ar nodded. "I dislike the idea of abandoning an ally to face a threat alone, but your reasoning is sound. Your ships produce an inordinate amount of heat. We will keep your electronic soldiers safe and provide a secure area for cool down and repair."

"It's not that I don't think you can help the battle," Admiral Smith started.

"The Atrekna are beyond our effective range. Our nCv Cannons take nearly nine minutes to hit and we do not have the luxury of temporal ranging systems. Our missiles take thirty-eight minutes of flight time to reach the Atrekna," Cu'udchu'ar broke in. "Additionally, we are under massive psychic attack that is only being mitigated by your modified drones."

The last referred to how several ships had gotten too far away from the phasic disruptor drones and the crew had suddenly turned on their fellow crewmates even as the ship had attacked its mates.

"Once you burn the gas giants, that will eliminate the only foe we can effectively engage, meaning we will be a liability that you must expend resources and effort to defend rather than have us be a meaningful part of the combat," Cu'udchu'ar continued. "Strategically, we must withdraw in order to allow the Confederate Space Force Navy to use their weapons at full effectiveness."

Admiral Smith nodded, carefully keeping the surprise from showing on her face.

"We will know when you activate Light-Brite," Cu'udchu'ar said solemnly. "We will start the counter then, and jump out by vulnerability afterwards."

He paused for a long moment. "I will stay until I cannot any longer."

"Then it's together," Smith said.

Cu'udchu'ar nodded. "Together."

The signal ended and Cu'udchu'ar turned to look at the Grand Most High Executor. "What are your feelings of aligning with the lemurs?"

The Executor, who had barely survived an attack by the Night Terran, shook his armored head. "The Great Herd's arrogance brought it to warfare with the mad lemurs of Terra. We now face not only the Precursor Autonomous War Machines, but one of the ancient precursor races.

The Executor went stock still, then shook his head again. "We must align with them."

"You do not feel it is treason?" Cu'udchu'ar asked.

The Executor signified negative. "Treason would be giving the mad lemurs of Terra reason to not only destroy us but then, after their inevitable victory, destroy our people, the very people who look to us for leadership and protection."

He tapped his chest with the fingers of all four hands. "The very people we have committed vast betrayals upon for countless millions of years. To not align with the mad lemurs of Terra, to bring their martial prowess against what will be defenseless worlds after we are destroyed, would just be one final treason of those we are charged with protecting."

Cu'udchu'ar nodded, noticing that his theater command bridge crew were all nodding along. "I agree, Most High. We must not only survive this fight, but we must convince the mad lemurs of Terra to allow us to leave with the strength to do what must be done."

He turned and looked at the holotank. "We must convince the Unified Council to end this war. The lemurs might as well be doing magic to our primitiveness. Our worlds survive only because they feel horror at the idea of slaughtering billions."

Cu'udchu'ar paused a long moment, knowing full well that the records being made of what was being said and done on the flag bridge would sentence him to immediate termination if they ever got out.

"A horror our people should have felt at attacking peaceful worlds," he said softly. "We claim to be oh so superior to the lemur, but we are worse than the autonomous war machines."

Cu'udchu'ar felt the Executor's hand on his shoulder as the other Lanaktallan trotted up next to him.

"We will return to Council Space, and we will make this right, brother," the Executor said. "We will end this war, save our people."

----------------------

The Quorums aboard the vast starships linked together into a cooperative whole, then reached out again toward their foes. Not the screaming raving primates, but the Grazing Ones. They intended on taking control of the Grazing Ones, capitalizing on their latent ability for phasic communication, and forcing them to fight one another, to turn on each other.

They were rebuffed by primate screaming as well as psychic protective fields.

Time was still hammered flat, still unable to be twisted and warped and properly manipulated, spiked deeply to keep it from being changed.

Which meant that the fleets had to be temporally constructed on the other side of the wormhole. Which meant that that Atrekna had to properly shepherd their munitions as ammunition was finite.

They could not even leave the system, as they were nailed in place in the timestream. Their temporal engines were cold and dead, forcing them to continue the fight.

Another wave of missiles came howling in. Despite the warnings of those who had fought for the long hours, the newcomers reached out with their power to take control of the electronic intelligences, to force them to detonate early or perhaps even turn them back against their makers.

They had been warned, but they had not believed, so when they touched the electronic systems of the missile's guidance systems they recoiled in shock.

getcha getcha getcha gonna getcha gonna getcha was repeated over and over in a blood drenched insane scream from a bloody throat that was chewed on by jagged sharp teeth. It was the electronic equivalent of madness that raked and bit and clawed and chewed on the Atrekna minds that touched it.

you you you gonna getchu gonna getchu gonna getchu for touching me for touching me for touching me know you know you know you found you found you found you gonna getchu gonna getchu bite rip tear bite rip tear

With horror the Conclaves that had reached out to those weapons found the weapons reaching out toward them in madness, felt the missile systems lock on not only onto their ships but onto them in particular.

Aboard the missiles, the half-baked warbois shrieked with delight and kicked in the sprint drives.

WE SEE YOU!

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"Haymaker has entered the wormhole, ma'am."

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Rickytofen-773C24 screamed as his ship entered something charitably called realspace, feeling fluid leak from his eyes. He blinked several times and his ship reported to him its status.

He was the only one that had made it. The rest of his wing had been torn apart by gravitational forces withing the wormhole. His ship was damaged, but still operational. His main cannons were out, but his drives, stealth systems, passive sensors, and his primary payload was still intact. The creation engine was working hard to replace and repair systems. He only protection was the ship's armor, even his particle screens were dead.

But from what his passive sensors were reporting, he wouldn't need particle screens because if there was a stray particle anywhere, his sensors had missed it.

Rather than use his main engines he fired up the catepillar drive, which put dozens, hundreds of tiny graviton spikes into the substance of space-time and used it to crawl forward. It was undetectable, as far as Space Force knew, although slow.

Ricky's onboard medical nanites finished repairing the gravity damage to his body as he slowly moved toward his target.

If you had only one shot, one chance, would you take it? the lines from the ancient classical war-chant bubbled up in his mind, courtesy of his implant.

He napped, several times, as he moved toward the target.

After his third stasis nap he ran the targeting solutions and found out he was in optimum range. True, the payload would kill him when it went off, but that had been part of the mission from the design.

Clone War Lyfe, Ricky thought to himself as he carefully aligned the modified Viper-IX.

The targeting system, relying totally on passive and Ricky's ability to target with the old Mark-One Eyeball, beeped.

Ricky used his thumb to flip up the plastic cover over the firing stud, squeezed the grip to release the safety, and thumbed the trigger three times.

The particle accelerator grabbed Ricky, the Viper-IX strike craft, the payload, and launched it all at near-C velocity at the target.

The wormhole generator.

Which hung just above the plasma seas of the more energetic of the two red giants.

The plan had been simple. A phasically enhanced antimatter warhead big enough to destroy any facility that could produce that large of a wormhole for that amount of time. Infused with wrath and hatred, wrapped in a warsteel jacket that was additionally infused, and two of the linear accelerator's rails being phasic munition chargers, the plan was just to destroy the facility.

Unknown to the planners, the particles, even the photons, chronotrons, and the spooky-particles, were all nearly exhausted in this universe.

The antimatter and the warsteel and every other part of the munition that Ricky himself had become, was not only from a more excited universe, but excited by that universe's standards.

The round, the size of a telephone pole, hit dead center of the wormhole generator. The particle wave that the Viper-IX and Ricky himself had become hit first. It should have just damaged the shield, maybe caused it to fail.

Instead, the shield's depleted, exhausted, spent particles and energy reacted to Ricky himself.

And exploded as the energy charge tried to equalize.

Part of Ricky and most of the Viper-IX kept going.

Into the photosphere of the star.

Where he hit, by stellar standards, wasn't that big. The red giant was mainly held together by technology, by stellar stabilizers. It was not as dense as the stars Ricky had flown upon, closer to a dense nebula or low gravity gas giant. It was still a red giant, and Ricky was only about two meters long and a meter wide.

But what remained of him and his Viper-IX was more energetic than anything that the stellar mass had encountered in two thousand years.

The explosion was a thousand miles wide, disrupting the star's photosphere and causing plasma to gout out in a coronal mass ejection that was energized by the remainder of energy from Ricky himself, his Viper-IX consumed.

The other star, beyond depleted, reached out and grabbed the coronal mass ejection greedily, assisted by the Atekna particle scoop fields.

The mass crossed two hours and connected the two red giants.

That was when chance reared its head.

A gift from a malevolent universe to its dead brethren.

The antimatter charge, which had plunged into the star itself, finally found enough mass to detonate.

Normally, a charge half the size of a telephone pole wouldn't matter. Even gravity compressed antimatter wouldn't matter to a stellar mass.

Except for the charge difference.

Not only was the phasically enhanced anti-matter rapidly devouring the very matter of the red giant, it had to do so at a rate of millions of atoms of the stellar mass per atom of antimatter. Then the charge difference by the radiation produced. Even white light exploded as the photons exploded through millions of atoms without losing much charge beyond converting the matter of the dead universe into energy.

The charge went from a planet cracker charge.

To a sun-breaker.

Detonated inside of two suns connected by a coronal mass ejection nearly a thousand miles wide.

The very mass of the two suns worked against it as the energetic particles from the other universe met the depleted particles of the dying universe and the charges tried to equalize, which destroyed the depleted particles, converting them to energy, which tried to equalizer the charge with the surrounding particles.

It turned into a cascade resonance.

Both suns exploded, turning into expanding shockwaves of energetic particles seeking to equalize their charges.

The entropic shielding held the explosion for just long enough.

Long enough for the entire inside of the entropic shield to equalize the charges.

Before it ripped apart the entropic shield as the last matter of the dead universe was consumed in a cannibalistic orgy of self immolation.

The particles slowly spread out, losing energy.

The dead universe heard its brethren whisper back.