The Planetship; Navigational Command
The Canés Venatici Galaxy
The Gamma Onisis System, Sector Alpha Tango Theta
MAR 19 2795/2795.078; 0805 Hours (CST)

No sooner did Supreme Overseer Choohan’s Planetship arrive at the scene of the battle than the unfortunate news was received.

"The Heathens have decimated Edenis and Tranquis-C."

Choohan had already run every disturbing detail of the situation over in his mind. The new developments were abrupt, unforeseen, and embarrassing for the Magistry. That two of the Heathens’ carrier units were able to slip by their forces and drop their weapons of destruction on two Steltek worlds...

Choohan told himself the two worlds were of little consequence, partly considering the majority of the planets’ surface was left untouched. Not when in light of their righteous mission of vindication. Sacrifices would be made, but the Steltek Magistry would ultimately reclaim what had once been rightfully theirs. The filthy Heathens stood between them; they would be purged. It was the order of things. Even a sakkin could see that.

The Purpose would not be so easily undermined.

"Status of the conflict?" he calmly asked one of his aides.

A visibly sakkin aide appeared at his side. "Over a hundred Heathen carrier units have been purged by the brunt of our Marauderships in this solar system. They have approximately six hundred more of varying sizes, ordinances, and configurations."

"The Heathen starfighters?"

"We have lost some droneships to them, but they are ultimately no threat to the sheer number of our droneships."

"Most commendable." The solar system in question was Orinocae, though he had heard Heathen comm chatter that indicated they had decided to nickname it something called "Gamma Onisis." Orinocae was a little over a sector unit away from the nest of the Steltek Magistry, marked by Hiveworld. The Heathens would never get that far. "Losses on our side?"

"Negligible, Supreme Overseer. The thirty-nine Marauderships in-system are intact."

"Then the vindication goes well." Choohan nodded in satisfaction, his membranous tendrils flinching involuntarily. "It will be in Orinocae that the Magistry will make its final stand against the Heathens."

"Supreme Overseer?"

"Yes, this will be it," he decided. "Contact Magistrate Eolin and recall all clusters dispatched into Heathen space and send for all available Marauderships from our outlying territories. Victory is in our grasp. I want it to be quick and orderly."

"Yes, Supreme Overseer."

For the Heathens, the day of their Armageddon was upon them.

TCS Concord’s Claw; Bridge
0819 Hours (CST)

The readings were all conclusive. After only a half hour, neither J-22 or J-5 read any discernible lifeforms whatsoever.

Commodore Blair stared emptily at the ongoing battle through the viewports of the bridge, his back to Captain Kincaid. "The warheads the Claw and Phlegethon dropped... there was more in them than just the Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 payload, wasn’t there?"

The young woman said nothing in defense.

"You knew about it, didn’t you?" Blair pressed. "This has the Black Projects Division written all over it."

After a moment of intensity-wrought silence, the ever-calm, ever-collected Kincaid spoke her piece, "You’re right, Chris. It does. The same Black Projects Division that you owe your life to right now."

Blair clenched his fists. It wasn’t fair for her to bring that up, not now. The secret of Christopher Blair’s cloning by the Black Projects after his maniacal spree in 2685 to deal with the first Steltek incursion in 2793 was known to only a select few, and Kincaid was one of them. "No, Julie. The same Black Project Division that created the Black Lance. The same Black Projects Division that murdered millions on Telamon IV." Blair stiffened his pose, his memories of those times surfacing. "Those warheads were packed with Bio-Convergence nanobots, weren’t they?"

"I’m sorry, Chris. I should have told you, but I wasn’t sure you would understand." Kincaid paused. "ConFleet High Command decided that taking out a quarter of two Steltek worlds wouldn’t be a sufficient enough demonstration of how much of a threat we could pose to them. They wanted all life wiped off of each. I just wasn’t sure you’d understand..."

"Understand?" Blair barked. "What’s to understand? You let us unleash Geoffrey Tolwyn’s Gen-Select bioweapons on two worlds with populations numbering in the billions!"

"They destroyed Earth, Chris," she spat bitterly. Blair, even knowing what had just been done, couldn’t bring himself to contest the fact. "Earth and who knows how many other of our worlds by now." Kincaid sighed, looking down. "Just let this one go, Chris. It’s not worth any grief over... not when we’re about to be genocidally wiped out."

Blair turned away, conflicting emotions playing out on his face.

"Twenty of our convoys have been destroyed, sir!" an ensign informed without anyone asking. "One hundred and ninety carriers are gone!"

Blair sighed, then asked weakly, "The Steltek haven’t tried to communicate with us since the strikes on J-22 and J-5?"

"No, sir."

It had been wishful thinking anyway, he decided grimly. The Steltek didn’t think like the Kilrathi. They were as old as Blair’s galaxy, maybe older. As warped as the Steltek’s motives might have been, they knew no fear, only the age-instilled certainty that their cause was right and their victory was assured. "Nothing from Ricaud yet?"

"Not a word, sir."

"The Marauders?"

The young ensign only shook his head. "None down, sir. And... a new Steltek vessel has joined the battle. It’s at least four times larger than any of their Marauders, and seems to match the description of the single ship that took out Earth."

With some sense of hesitation, Blair brought himself to look at the viewports. The gigantic, V-shaped Steltek ship cast its shadow over every ship in sight, eclipsing the Gamma Onisis sun with its black hull.

Almost immediately upon its appearance, a rapid-fire release of plasma charges were released seemingly randomly into space from its three vertices. Out of the corner of his eye, Blair saw one of them strike the Kilrathi flagship.

"It was an honor to fight beside you, Heart of the Ti—" Crown Prince Serrikoth’s grisly voice cackled over the comm before being cut off. The KIS Kn’ath went up in an incandescent fireball before his eyes.

Blair let the image of the monstrous Steltek ship burn into his memory, then stalked off the bridge.

"Where are you going?" Kincaid called at him.

"To do what I can."

If Blair was going to die, he would do it in the cockpit.

TCS Phlegethon; Bridge
0825 Hours (CST)

Admiral Tierson buried his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes before looking back at the disastrous conflict.

The thirty-nine Steltek Marauders were in clear sight through the viewports on the bridge. The even-larger Steltek Planetship loomed behind the Marauders, its outline gleaming with amber in the red giant sun’s light ominously. The distance between the Terran-allied fleets and the Marauders was down to the thousands of klicks. The front lines of their fleets were shot down with systematical efficiency and abruptness by the Marauders. It wasn’t a battle, it was a firing squad.

It would be over quickly now. For all of them.

The reality of the present caught up with Tierson very quickly. One of the plasma discharges a Marauder had belched their way had already struck the Phlegethon, instantly blowing off the entire stern and tore into several decks on the port side. Being an omnicarrier, considerably larger than any class of carrier, supercarrier, or megacarrier, the appropriate decks had been long since sealed off. The once-proud flagship of the ConFleet Armada hung dead in space, firing its Phase-Transit and, to a lesser degree, its two dual Plasma Laser Cannon turrets. Its crew could only await the inevitable.

Bombing their worlds had no effect. If anything, it served to only drive the Steltek on even more so, adding to whatever maniacal ambition of "vindication" drove them on to begin with.

The Confederation had no trump cards left to play. Their plan had failed.

F/A-905C Nexus 101
0830 Hours (CST)

With the flip of two switches, Blair opened his ramscoops and went to his secondary armament. His Nexus’ multiphasic disruptor came on-line, seizing a fourth of his maximum velocity right away as it tapped into the power core. He had to give up his entire standard armament of advanced fusion cannons, mass driver guns, and flak cannons, but it made little difference, as standard weapons had no effect on Steltek shielding. Blair himself had been one of the Special Operations crew that had tinkered out the line of Anti-Steltek weaponry that the squadrons and carriers assembled now bore.

There was two flashes, and then another. More Marauders appeared behind the others, joining the battle. More flashes continued on, until there were well over fifty enemy capship blips on his HUD.

Blair knew the futility of what he was doing.

"CHRISTOPHER BLAIR OF THE TERRAN CONFEDERATION," came the voice of an anonymous Steltek on the comm. "THE STELTEK KNOW YOU."

"What," Blair sneered, "you remembering that Marauder I took out a couple years back?"

"YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. WE KNOW YOU. ONE OF YOUR TERRAN CENTURIES AGO, YOU LEFT YOUR SPACE AND SOUGHT US OUT. YOU CAME TO US LOST, EMPTY; WE MADE YOU WHOLE. WE GAVE YOU WHAT YOU NEEDED AND SENT YOU BACK ON A MISSION OF OUR OWN."

The revelation snapped in Blair’s mind. In 2684, when Blair had emerged from hiding since being believed dead during the destruction of the Nephilim gateway in ’81, Blair had joined the Firekkan Commonwealth and fought for them until his flagship was destroyed and his lover killed. He disappeared for a year, then returning from parts unknown to declare war on everyone he deemed his enemy, claiming he was on a mission of vindication by "They" who he had met during that unaccounted year. Millions of innocents had died by his hand on this mission of vindication.

It had never been established just who or what it was Blair had encountered in that year. Now he knew.

Blair in the present, however, had no memory of this himself. He was a clone of the original Blair, one with altered memory. Instead of remembering going insane and being killed, he remembered retiring and living to 2691, during which time he believed he was put into cryogenic stasis until 2793, when the Steltek made their first offensive. It wasn’t until almost a year later that he learned the truth, that he had been recreated as the Black Projects Division’s instrument of war.

"YOU KNOW THIS IS TRUE, CHRISTOPHER BLAIR," the Steltek speaking continued. "WE CAN GIVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED AGAIN. WE CAN GIVE YOU THAT WHICH YOU SEEK. GIVE YOURSELF TO OUR PURPOSE, OUR MISSION OF RIGHTEOUS VINDICATION ONCE MORE AND YOU MAY LIVE AS ONE OF US IN THE DAYS TO COME."

As he took his Nexus into a swarm of the egg-shaped Steltek Drones, he noticed for the first time that not a single one had targeted him. The Steltek were ignoring him.

"I’d rather die," Blair gave his answer.

"THEN YOU WILL DO SO AS A HEATHEN."

After a pause, Blair replied bitterly, "Wouldn’t have it any other way."

Using the Steltek Drones’ obliviousness to him to his advantage, Blair hammered away at a wing of five Drones he had been tailing. The blasts splashed across three of the Drones’ aft shields, screening their way through and smacking into pure hull. Keeping the now-evasive Drones in his sights, he waited out the ten second refire rate, then fired a new volley. Two of the Drones went up, and the third was nearly finished.

Waiting out the the refire rate again, he didn’t have time to dodge the combined plasma barrages of the four new Drones that had targeted him. His Nexus shook violently, his damage assessment screen lighting up with red highlights. Doing his best to evade the continuing attacks, the three Drones he had been tailing earlier joined the onslaught, pummeling his ship with the other four.

Blair had done his best, and it still wasn’t good enough.

As he prepared to continue his battle to the bitter end, Blair barely noticed the series of new flashes, these coming from behind Blair’s Nexus.

Peering wearily out the port of his canopy’s viewports to look at the new arrivals, a shocked look came to his eye.

KS Desiccator; Bridge
Arrival
0850 Hours (CST)

The Desiccator burst from S-Fold direct from the regions of space near the Galactic Core, trailing pseudomotion as it slowed to cruising speed. Following it in succession, an entire entourage of humongous, jet-black vessels poured from space travel fields of an unknown technology. Their foreboding shapes became apparent and defined as more kept on tearing through the void, streaming onward.

"Miss me?" Vell Ricaud II asked, transmitting to the entire assembly of Terran-allied warships.

The great black ships, relatively thin proportionately in width but at least a hundred kilometers in length, their hulls configured in the symmetric design of a double-helix, looked almost as one with space itself. The ships shot forth, continually joined by reinforcements that arrived in sequences of two or three, blowing past the Desiccator and tearing their way toward the heart of the battle.

"This is Fleet Admiral Tierson," came a gruff voice on the comm. "Is that you, Ser Ricaud?"

"One and the same," Vell chimed. "Sorry if I’m a little late, but I’ve brought the cavalry!"

"Who or what are these... ships?"

"They are the First Armada of the Ceti Imperium," explained Vell. "Or as your CIAI codenamed them in 2654.080, the ‘Double-Helix.’"

"The Double-Helix!" Tierson exclaimed, a sense of revelation coming into his voice. "I’ve heard of them. We’ve known about them since 2654, but only from glimpses of their ships by deep space probes. For a while I think it was even speculated they were one and the same with the Steltek."

"My guess is that can be pretty much discounted now," Vell stated the obvious.

"But I thought all the CICINTELs established the Double-Helix as being somewhat primitive..."

"The Ceti had us believing what they wanted us to believe. Anyway, it turns out Special Operations’ theory was right on the money. The Steltek didn’t simply leave our galaxy millennia ago and move to the Canés Venatici Galaxy by choice. They were driven out, exiled by the victors in a savage territorial war they were involved in. The Double-Helix—or rather, the Ceti—was this victor."

"And you talked them into taking on the Steltek one more time?"

"There was no need. Once the Ceti learned of the Steltek’s continued aggression toward other races, now raised to genocide, they came here of their own will. I had only to tell them where the Steltek were holed up now."

The Ceti ships, now numbering in the dozens but showing no sign of stopping their entry, were already flying over the Terran-allied convoys, now nearly upon the Steltek Marauders. The Marauders themselves were already reacting to the sight of the oncoming ships, instantly breaking off their attacks on the carriers and destroyers.

The Steltek recognize them, Vell mused, their old enemies, as ancient as they are. Their exilers.

Energy could be seen coursing through the intertwined helix-hulls of the Ceti ships, flickering and shimmering with the brightest luminescence as it streamed forward and gathered just beyond the tip of their vessels’ noses. Instantaneous bolts of the energy shotgunned outward, spearing the Marauders through their shields, punching clean holes through their hull and continuing out the other side. The Ceti ships were able to refire with fairly good succession, each one taking a Marauder target and firing at it relentlessly.

The Steltek fleet’s retaliation was a muted one. Clusters of the Marauders, joined by a few more that Vell noticed had been jumping into the system since his own arrival, fired their concentrated plasma charges at the Ceti. The Ceti ships’ shields, projected out as an oval-shaped bubble around their hull, only gave off ripple effects, as if the Steltek fire, the same fire that could destroy any Confederation capital ship with a single shot, did little more than create waves in a pool of water.

Then the Ceti swarm was upon their ancient enemies. Even as the Ceti continued to hurl their energy bolts, the Ceti ships rammed the Marauders at velocities of no less than 10,000 KPS. As the double-helix vessels became projectiles themselves, their shields held, and they rammed their way with little difficulty through the Steltek Marauders. Once within the mass of the Marauders, the Ceti ships’ frontal helix visibly twitched, the spiral then snapping open inside the Marauders and becoming pincers that literally gutted and tore the Marauders apart from the inside out.

Before the aweuck eyes of every Terran, Kilrathi, Firekkan, and otherwise allied man and woman, the Steltek fleet of Marauders became annihilated. Slowly, painstakingly, but the outcome was inevitable from the beginning. Marauders began to visually break apart throughout the battlefield of space, some large pyramid structures firing plasma charges even as the Marauders they were attached to were in their death throes.

The Terran-allied craft weren’t taking things lying down, either. For all they were worth, the carriers cut loose with everything they had, keeping the pressure on the crumbling Steltek fleet.

Vell jumped a little as he felt a hand on his shoulder. Noticing his fianceé, he turned to hold Melissa in his arms tightly.

"Is it over?" she asked.

"Almost, sweetheart," he spoke, nuzzling his head in her shoulders. "Almost."

The Planetship; Navigational Command
0902 Hours (CST)

"Supreme Overseer, we must act!"

The Ceti encroachment had already broken through the flanks and vanguards of the Maraudership Clusters stretched out before the Planetship. Twenty-five Marauderships had been reported lost at last count. Magistrate Eolin had been slain on the front lines, his chariot Maraudership humiliatingly torn to pieces by one of the lead Ceti vessels.

The Ceti... the Demons in the Mist; the Bane of the Magistry; the Obstacle of the Purpose; the Enemies of the Prime Leader.

If the inhabitants of the Steltek’s former galaxy were truly Heathens, the Ceti were Lords of the Heathens. Their harsh judicial ways were matched only by their advanced technology, technology even more ancient and advanced than the Steltek’s own.

"Please, Supreme Overseer! What is your will?"

It was well documented that this fact that caused the Steltek to lose the Great Purge in the Steltek Magistry’s Golden Age several millennia ago. That this fact led to their humiliating exile to Canés Venatici.

The Great Purge, Choohan cursed to himself, the Steltek’s blackest time.

In their post-primitive times, the Steltek, then long since a space-faring race, sought to effectively rid their rightfully owned galaxy of its Heathen inhabitants in the outlying worlds it set out to colonize. Centuries passed and the Steltek grew stronger, their territories expanding, more Heathen races being vindicated and purged. With only a few remaining worlds holding only a few more Heathen populaces left, the Great Purge was declared by the Magistry, and the total Steltek cleansing and occupation of the galaxy was in clear sight.

Then, at the height of the Great Purge, came the Ceti.

"Supreme Overseer, the Ceti are nearly at the Planetship!"

Perhaps in their vain the Steltek thought themselves the interstellar police, setting out into the vast regions of space to impose their sense of right and wrong on every race they encounter. The Magistry knew precious little of the Ceti Imperium, though they did not care. When faced with an enemy they did not have the power to vindicate, their only concern became survival.

But now, after millennia, the Ceti returned to finish the job when the Steltek Magistry at last mustered enough strength to attempt a second Great Purge. Exile would surely no longer be good enough for them... there would be no second Exodus. Not this time. Those who did not understand the Purpose would forever be Heathen, and Heathen would forever stand against the Steltek.

For a fleeting moment, in the final few seconds before the Ceti ships would reach the Planetship, Choohan wondered if the Purpose was truly just.

F/A-905C Nexus 101
0932 Hours (CST)

"Good grief..." Blair muttered under his breath, a drop of sweat trickling from his brow.

Minutes ago the Ceti vessels had finished their work on the Steltek Marauders, then had converged on the massive Planetship. Like some kind of gigantic praying mantises the Ceti vessels worked, the majority of them picking apart the Planetship’s hull with their pincer-esque appendages, some releasing volleys of unknown energies against the Planetship’s bare inner hull.

When their work was at last done and all that was left of the Planetship was lifeless, free-floating space debris, the Ceti’s black warships turned slowly, methodically toward what was left of the Terran-allied fleet. The Ceti just paused there for a moment, leaving the Terrans and their allies to wonder if they, too, would become prey to the Ceti, but that did not seem to be so. In the blink of an eye, just as quickly and mysteriously as they had made their appearance, they made their exit.

Blair gave a heavy sigh, then let himself accept what had seemed so impossibly out of reach for the Terran Confederation. A host of deafening victorious hoots and battle cries could be heard over his headset so he took it off and rested his face in his gloved hands.

Earth had been avenged... and now the Steltek War was over.