Something was wrong here. Something was desperately wrong here.

Admiral Corise Lucerne turned his head toward the ship's tactical officer, unwilling to take his eyes off of the sensor reports. “Power up, prep for hyperspace jump.”

But before Estralla's bridge crew could even move to comply, warning klaxons sounded and the sensor screens burst with new data.

Corise's mind deciphered what his eyes saw at the same time it registered the reports from his officers.

Heavy interdiction detected.

Communications channels jammed.

System-wide mass-reversions.

Weapons fire.

This wasn't how it was supposed to happen. The Reavers had been drifting into the system for two days now, never more than a few ships at a time, arriving seemingly at random, caught up by the nearest gravity well and pulled back to realspace. They'd shown no interest in the self-isolated Vahaba asteroid colonies, which now ran at minimal power.

The Reavers were supposed to pass them by. Vahaba was supposed to be safe. They were supposed to live.

Run! The command was deafening, overwhelming. He almost doubled over, head pounding, ears ringing. Flee for your life! He made to give the command, mouth opening, but the words inexplicably stopped in his throat.

Stay and you will die! The Reavers will take you! Run now!

Run.

Run.

Run!

Flee!

Abandon your post!

RUN! Corise gasped for breath, mind reeling.

Finally, his vision came back into focus, and he willed himself to absorb the tactical input. The helmsman had altered course. “What are you doing?”

“Course is set for the near edge of the interdiction field. At flank speed―”

“What? No! We can't outrun the Reavers.”

The tactical officer, Rojas, spoke up. “Admiral, we're lit up like a torch in a dark room on their sensors right now. All we can do is run.”

Corise turned to the tactical officer, his confusion evident. “Lit up? Why are we powered up?”

“You ordered us to,” he answered bluntly.

“That was before they arrived!” Corise shouted, waiving at the viewscreen.

“I asked if I should continue with powerup operations.”

“What? When?”

“Just a minute ago, while you were staring blankly at your screens.”

Corise's brows furrowed, trying to recount the past few moments. All those voices . . . His eyes widened in shock and he settled instinctively upon a course of action, bounding over the low rail that separated the command section from the stations below, drawing his blaster pistol and pushing it against the back of the helmsman's neck. “I said we're not running.”

Rojas drew his own blaster, pointing it at Corise. “We said we would follow you because you said you would lead us to freedom. I'm looking around, and I'm not free yet.”

Run!

Fight!

Kill him!

Die

Run now!

Fire!

Give up! Surrender to your fate!

Corise squeezed his eyes tight, blinking twice, struggling against the pounding in his skull. He tightened his grip on the helmsman's shoulder, pushing the blaster more firmly against his neck. “Listen to me―”

“I knew Corise Lucerne,” Rojas said. “I mean, I have memories of Corise Lucerne,” he clarified, his own voice wavering with doubt. “You are not the man who―”

Whoever he was, out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the opportunity he needed. The slightest sway of Rojas' arm, the wavering of his blaster, and Corise acted. He dove away, turning toward Rojas and bringing his blaster to bear.

A single shot landed squarely in the tactical officer's chest, his eyes widening in horror as he fell backward, his blaster slipping from his grip.

Corise jumped back to his feet, blaster at the ready.

Run!

Run!

“Enough!” He tossed the blaster aside, chest heaving, head bowing. “I told you that I could get you out. I told you that we could make it. I told you we'd be safe, we'd be free. But that's not going to happen anymore.” He looked up at them, features softening. “And if I'm about to die, I want to die as the man I used to be, the man my memories tell me I am.

“Helm, take us into the fight. We have a sworn duty to uphold.”



The Reavers were concentrated on one side of the solar system, that nearest Reaver Space. Since their “awakening,” they had focused entirely on the Vahaba asteroid colonies, the only locations of life in the entire system. As such, the Reavers now rushed into the nearest sections of the asteroid belt, consuming both the flesh and technology of its inhabitants. So great were their numbers, that by the time Estralla had arrived from the far edge of the system, where it had been in hiding, the Reavers were already expanding along both sides of the belt. Fully one half of the system's inhabitants had been lost in the space of minutes.

And then her sensors pierced the shadows and distortion of the asteroids themselves, and the crew of Estralla caught a glimpse of what they were really fighting. More artificial moon than starship or space station, the massive Reaver construct which appeared to have jumped directly into the asteroid belt swelled on the viewscreen, its gruesome, bulbous form shifting visibly, its surface rippling as though it were made of water.

Run!

We can still escape!

It's not too late!

You don't have to die here today!

Corise held his composure, but his mind wouldn't give up the thought. “Helm, what's the―”

“Sir, I'm receiving blink code from the Vahaba Command,” the comm officer reported. “William Rhaz and the command ship Stonegazer are alive and in contact with the Vahaba SnubFleet, but their chief commanders have not reported in, and are feared lost. He's awaiting orders.”

The snub fighters weren't running. They were the fastest ships in the system; if they knew they couldn't run, then what chance did Estralla have?

Fortunately, the Admiral of the Contegorian Confederation's cowardice operated independently of his tactical genius. The Snub Fleet lived for asteroid combat. The Reavers . . . they had never fought a major engagement in an asteroid-rich environment.

Vahaba would be overrun. Corise and his crew would be killed, or worse. No one would escape this day. But first the Reavers would pay a price for destroying his future. “Signal Stonegazer; all defensive forces are to amass at grid sectors A-48 and ZZ-47. Instruct the SnubFleet to make fighting withdrawals as circumstances require. We're going to drag the Reavers through the belt, and fight them on our own terms.”

As for Estralla . . . she would have to do the same.



“Bring us around for another pass! Flag our escort to break away and meet us on the other side. And try dodging this time.”

This was exciting. This was really exciting. Heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, he could almost forget he was about to die. Even when the thought came racing back to mind, it felt distant, like someone else's revelation.

Estralla was an agile beast, but she was still one hell of a beast, and Corise didn't know how much more of this punishment she could take. Her powerful shields could shrug off even glancing blows from the larger asteroids, and her tactical computer was versatile enough to help plot relatively safe courses through the field, but the damage was mounting, and soon Estralla's defenses would be down to armor plating alone.

That wouldn't be such a problem, except the Reavers were filling local space with dust plumes of their corruption, clouds of nanomachines capable of consuming flesh and steel alike. Sensors had caught a number of the Reaver “trash ships,” those sewn together from the wreckage of destroyed vessels, dissipate on the spot, the Reaver infection which held the fragmentary pieces together simply dissolving, spreading into the surrounding asteroid field.

If Estralla's shields failed, she would be compromised within minutes. Corise's only course of action would be to order a self destruct while systems were still capable of complying.

The shields had to hold. They had to live. They had to fight.

“Incoming missiles!” The new tactical officer shouted, his worry evident. “Brace for impact!”

The ship shuddered under the force of the blasts, warning alarms sounding as ship's systems registered minor kinetic force bleeding through the inertial dampening systems. “Status?”

“Particle shields are holding. Initiating power transfers to normalize . . . Sir, incoming Reaver vessel, collision course.”

Corise looked to the viewscreen where a small Reaver corvette analogue was weaving its way through the asteroid belt, intent on claiming Estralla. “All weapons, target and fire. Evasive maneuvers. All available power to particle shielding. And signal our escorts to break from intercept and render direct assistance.

“Evade, dammit!” Corise added, knowing full well that Estralla couldn't outmaneuver the smaller craft.

The ship shuddered monstrously under the force of a head-on asteroid collision, forward shields dropping dangerously low as the protective energies of the ship pulverized the asteroid outright.

Save yourself. You have the power, you know what to do.

The seconds ticked by, the data scrolled across the screens, and the end result was clear. Estralla was about to be destroyed.

Do it! Save yourself. Save your ship!

It was automatic; his mouth moved without his mind telling it to. “Order the fighters to ram the Reaver ship. Cripple its engines.” We have to live. We have to live. We have to fight. The thoughts repeated through his mind, his justification for sacrificing others to save himself.

He knew such thoughts didn't belong to him, but that wasn't enough to stop him from obeying.

I have to live. Another day. Another hour. Another minute. I have to live.

Corise watched six of Vahaba's valiant defenders smash themselves into the Reaver vessel, fantastic plumes of fire erupting as their armed warhead payloads detonated on impact. Estralla dodged the crippled ship with no more effort than the flick of the helmsman's wrist.

The mighty warship burst through the far side of the asteroid field, her diminished starfighter escort forming up nearby, faithfully awaiting the next order that would see their numbers thinned further.

For all the shame he knew he should feel, Amiral Corise Lucerne allowed a sly grin to creep across his face.

He was still alive.



There was more than one. Estralla's sensors had caught glimpses of eight different Reaver moon-ships lurking within the Vahaba Asteroid Belt, all of them located in the quarter of the belt that the ship could get any reliable readings on. Their purposes remained unknown, but they were filling the space around themselves with the Reaver infestation, so thick that sensors couldn't penetrate the clouds to get direct scans of the massive craft.

And still the Reavers came. New reversions every couple of minutes, pulled out of hyperspace by the Reavers' own interdiction fields.

They had abandoned their focused march through the asteroid field hours ago, launching ships across the system's open ecliptic plane to circumvent the Vahaba defenses and directly assault the “safe zone” where the last few uncorrupted settlements remained.

The defenders, for their part, had been forced to withdraw almost constantly, and the Reavers now held fully three fourths of the asteroid belt. The battle map was less than symbolic, however. The Reaver infestation had swelled past the Reaver combat lines, bounding from asteroid to asteroid, consuming both raw and finished materials.

So great was the fear of the Reaver infection, that as the battle pushed into its fourth day, whole squadrons of the Vahaba SnubFleet were being refused entry into the clear zone, where pilots could be rotated out and minor repairs effected.

The end was drawing near; only hours remained before there wouldn't be a single uninfected being in the solar system. And still, at the forefront of Corise Lucerne's mind, a voice shrieked out for his survival, at whatever cost. It commanded him, compelled him, shouting against all reason and odds to flee, to run for open space and make for the edge of the system.

Estralla's shield alert flickered from bright orange to crimson red, and Corise looked to his other readouts for confirmation.

Run now! Before the shields are gone and all is lost! You serve no one by dying here today! It was desperate, frantic, deranged. It was powerful, crippling . . . but it was expected.

“Not this time,” Corise whispered, hands tightening painfully against the guard rail. The asteroid belt rushed at them through the viewscreen, the last pass into the Reaver lines that would seal Estralla's fate. “Helm, alter course. Skirt the edge of the belt and bring us in on top of the nearest Reaver moon-craft. Drop shields and charge for reactivation. And ready the main cannon.”

Corise sank into his command chair, days of exhaustion clawing at him as the voice in his mind was joined by another, and another, and then ten . . . an endless sea of cries and shouts, a torrent of will that he no longer had the strength to defy.

The here-and-now faded from sight and mind, and Corise fought simply to remain silent, still, to be nothing because he could no longer be himself.

He could feel the chair shake beneath him, knew somewhere in his clouded consciousness that they were asteroid impacts directly against the ship's hull, that her outer decks would be breached and her inner compartments exposed to the Reaver infection, that the only fate left to him was madness and death.

His voice opened to give the one command, to shout for the shields to be reengaged before Estralla passed too near to the massive Reaver construct, where the clouds of infestation were visible as dissipating plumes of dust, where the ship's systems would last only seconds before being compromised. He needed a little more time, just a minute or two, just long enough . . . but his voice would not sound its final command. His body was lost to the thousand-million cries of madness, to the ocean of rage that washed over him, now that he had denied them their desire, now that he had ensured their death.

This is not Reaver infection, a tiny voice spoke in the midst of the chaos. They would welcome me into their midst . . .

This is madness; this is insanity. The voice was lost in the chaos, too feeble, to broken to rise above the vengeful roars.

The feel of the chair beneath him changed, a low vibration so unlike the force of impacts. Corise Lucerne forced his eyes to open into slits, watched the brilliant display unfold before him. A chuckle escaped his lips, lips that curled into a victorious smile.

Corise Lucerne, the real Corise Lucerne, held one secret deep inside his soul, one question that could no longer be answered: Could I have defeated the Black Dragon Imperium? Now, in his last seconds of life, the clone of that man watched the answer as it was written between the stars.

The Contegorian Confederation had been founded to counter the Black Dragon Empire's impressive technology and expansionist policies. Its own military technology had been developed precisely to oppose the Imperium's unique forms of warcraft. When the Confederation seceded from the Coalition and converted its military to defend against more generalized threats, many doubted the Confederation's substantial research into countering Imperium technology would ever see use.

Now, finally, against the successors of the Dragon Imperium, the once-abandoned technologies of the Confederation had just been put to use. The main cannon of Estralla had just been fired.

The beam pierced the Reaver construct clean through, seconds later the surface of the moon-ship erupting with red-hot crevasses, its structure boiling apart from the inside out as the basic chemical processes powering the Reaver nano-machines were turned against themselves.

“Maintain course,” Corise's weak and bitter voice whispered, the sight of this victory giving him some small strength to push on. “Initiate self-destruct. Detonate as we enter the center of the mass.”

It was cold. It was heartless. It was necessary. Estralla had passed through the asteroid belt with her shields lowered. Her outer hull was contaminated. Her numerous breaches would only accelerate the spread to vital systems. Estralla's fate was sealed, as was that of her crew. The powerful reaction that had reduced the Reaver construct to slag would die quickly, and once it had burned itself out the wreckage would be consumed and reshaped, cast anew into the thing it had once been. A full-scale reactor overload in the heart of the mass would reduce it to its elementary components, forcing the Reavers to expend vast energies if ever again they wanted to shape it into something of use.

It was a dismal, inglorious end to a heroic last stand. It would buy the galaxy perhaps another few hours in the grand scheme of whatever insidious plot the Reavers now operated by. It was the best Admiral Lucerne could do with the tools at his disposal.

For the clone admiral and his clone followers, in the face of such unbridled evil, that would have to be enough.

And then, eerily, impossibly, a voice spoke into the silence which had fallen over the bridge. Through the maddeningly hopeless screams of Reaver jamming, a voice spoke, bold and compelling, as clear as though it were present on that very bridge.

“We are Guardian, and we are many.”

His name was Athan, and the only thing he loved more than the Cooperative, were his people. His people, who the Cooperative had sheltered and prospered.

His name was Athan, and he was Ryn. He was Ryn, and he was an Emissary of the Cooperative.

Snatching the ID badge from his shirt pocket, he palmed the controls on the small holocomm station and swiped the badge's code pins across the station's scanner, instantly pulling up a remote interface for the Cooperative HoloNet. Past half a dozen security lockouts, the Ryn official spoke a single word and the full power of the Cooperative's information network bent itself to his command: “Overseer.”

He waited a handful of seconds, and then the familiar blue-white avatar of the Overseer coalesced in front of him, its lidless eyes staring intently, its mouthless face a mask of stoic resolve. “You called, friend?” But the voice was peaceful, kind. Familiar.

Athan cast furtive glances into the corners of the dark room, his apprehension building now that the deed was imminent. “Smarts, I think I'm in trouble here. I think I'm in real trouble.”

Smarts was instantly reassuring. “Whatever's happened, Athan, I'm sure―”

“You don't understand,” he nearly shouted, holding out a hand for emphasis. “I still have friends in the workforce. Good people, reliable people, people who keep to themselves, do commendable work, and don't ask questions. When people like that tell you something is going wrong, you listen. You listen, or you die.

“Athan, what are you talking about?”

The Ryn took a few deep breaths, his own internal struggle building. “I had to make sure, Smarts. I had to know for myself before I brought you into this.”

“What is it, my friend?”

Athan lifted his head to stare directly in those brilliant white eyes, jaw set and posture uncomfortably straight. “The terrorist Jarvis Ragnar is recruiting from within the Ryn Nation. There is a plot to steal a Cornucopia and at least a dozen of its support ships. We are a hair's breadth from becoming the most substantial supporters of the most active terrorist organization in the galaxy.”

The avatar of the Overseer collapsed into a ball of light, shrunk to a pinprick, and vanished.







War without. War within. War all about.

Traan Shi was a diplomat, an emissary of peace, not a herald of war. He was not equipped to deal with insurrection. The halfheartedness of the Praetorian Guard to raise their arms in aggression against fellow countrymen who chose to fight the Empire (the same Empire, of course, which the Guard still unofficially considers itself at war with) had forced him to dismiss them from Amorris and Selcaron altogether. The partly formed local peacekeeping and law enforcement organizations of the two worlds had been subject to as much defection as any other element of the formerly Onyxian governments, leaving them in a disorganized and dubiously trustworthy state. Much of the massive Cooperative Defense Force presence had been siphoned away as the threat of Reaver invasion grew, leaving even the core of Traan's security and anti-insurgency force diminished to woefully inadequate numbers.

And those were only the technical consideration. Amorris and Selcaron were ripe for true civil war, brother against brother, the newest and hopefully last dividing line between those Onyxians intent on the liberation of their homeworlds, and those Cooperative citizens who had once lived under the banner of the Onyxian Commonwealth. If he could not achieve a peaceful resolution, and soon, then Traan Shi would doubtlessly see his authority superseded by a military commander, and a state of martial law imposed.

So dire were the threats of this day. So lacking was the Guiding Light of liberty. What had become of the Cooperative he had swore himself to? Where would it end, and how much more need be sacrificed to the fires of war?

Traan's office door chimed and he tapped the desk control to open it. Rane Cardan, his most trusted assistant, stood framed in the doorway, his expression grim and ominous. Without a word he entered the office, set a datapad in front of Traan, and turned to leave.

By the time Traan had read the two dozen words on the screen, Rane Cardan was gone. The tap of a single button activated the secure comm built into his desk, and Traan Shi spoke a single word: “Overseer”.

He didn't even wait for the holoimage to resolve itself into the Overseer's avatar. As soon as the connection light flashed green, he read the message aloud: “The personnel and equipment of the Praetorian Guard refuses to be utilized in the opposition or repression of the Onyxian Repatriation Movement.”

After a long moment of silence, Traan added: “Well, at least they aren't planning to assist them.”







“Emperor?” The tone was cautious, submissive . . . but urgent.

Set upon the Obsidian Throne of Drackmar's Realm, Emperor Drconis the Restorer held his powerful voice in check, his whispered words easily dwarfing the messenger's guarded tone. “Who has failed me this time?”

Shrinking beneath the weight of the Emperor's gaze, the Drackmarian nevertheless held to his duty. “Central Command has lost communications with Admiral Maggog's fleet.” Heading off the Emperor's enraged response, a dangerous thing to be sure, the messenger quickly continued. “In the seconds before the Admiral's flag was fired upon, we received an image string through the Strategic Interlink. It appeared to be a Confederacy warfleet.”

An unnatural growl sounded from deep within the Drackmarian Emperor, ending with the smallest movement of his massive head. “General Sarris' fleet must be recalled immediately. We must once more entrust the security of the Outer Worlds to our Cooperative allies.” When the messenger made to respond, Draconis allowed his voice to grow louder. “I have spoken. It will be so.”

“Sir, I do not question your order, but analysis of the image string identified something else within the Confederacy fleet. A number of vessels bore superficial resemblance to warships of the Galactic Empire. We could not match their markings to anything within our own records, but a query to the Coalition military databank returned a match to a force they have had no direct interaction with: the Palestar Crusade.”

Silence filled the echoing hall of the Emperor of Drackmar's Realm, even the usually deep breaths of the behemoth emperor falling shallow and subdued as he pondered this fearful revelation. “The Confederacy of our enemies has found a new ally, one with the power to take even from the Galactic Empire. But this Crusade has entered into an ancient struggle beyond its understanding. It is time that our enemies feel once more the Unbound Might of Drackmar's Way.

“Leave me. I have orders to issue.”

Once the tiny footsteps of the messenger receded to silence, Draconis drug his taloned fingers across the armrest of his throne, the patterns triggering the micro receptors imbedded beneath the black reflective stone. The avatar of the Overseer materialized before him, the image scaled up to match Draconis' own gargantuan size. “Overseer, I must be painfully frank with you. Our enemies in the Unknown Regions have gained new allies. The Palestar Crusade has struck a crippling blow to the Drackmarian Inner Fleet. I must recall General Sarris and his fleet to the Inner Worlds; should his forces prove insufficient to repulse this invasion, I will be left with no choice but to reactivate Drackmar's interdiction network and seal off the Inner Worlds until we can rebuild our military strength and counter the Confederacy in open combat.”







The sterile feel of entering these prefabricated, mass-deployed facilities after walking through such carnage and destruction always depressed Vice Admiral Gorn, making him feel as if his priorities were out of order.

Outside, though, to the thousands of civilians who had struggled for so long without hope, eking out an existence beneath the shadow of the Reaver Sourge, the towering factory-complexes and defensive embattlements that marked the Cooperative's protective presence shined as an undaunted beacon of hope, the physical manifestation of a whole people's will to fight and defy the indomitable might of the Reaver Onslaught.

Because the Cooperative had come to the Garos System, and it would not be leaving until there were no more Reavers to fight. The battle to secure Garos IV and Sundari against further Reaver assault had not been nearly as one-sided as the Cooperative Defense Command would like the galaxy at large to believe. By the time full Testudo defense networks were in place around the twin worlds, Gorn had lost several ships to Reaver boarding actions. It was a horrible burden of command to have to order your men to fire upon their comrades, but such was the tenacity of the Reaver virus that only a thorough purging by flame could ensure its destruction.

What remained of Gorn's fleet now held diligent station behind the protective barrier of the Testudo Orbital Shield, an imposing reminder to the on-worlds Imperial forces of their agreement, and a visible fulfillment of the Cooperative's pledge to defend the worlds' civilian survivors. The true burden Gorn bore, however, was the secret knowledge that if the Reavers decided to take these twin worlds back, the best he could hope for would be to die failing in their defense.

But the uneasy peace established between these beleaguered Imperial officers, war-worn Cooperative soldiers, and the tattered remnants of the adversarial worlds' civilian populations only grew more tense with each passing day. Beyond the shimmering defenses of the Testudo, Reaver hunting parties still plied the hyperlanes, appearing from time to time in the skies above, checking in on the state of their once-ripe feeding grounds.

Feethan Ottraw self-replicating factories now grew across the surface of Sundari, their smelting furnaces and assembly lines cranking out wave after wave of war materials the Imperial “masters” of these worlds were forbidden from inspecting. The civilian population had been conscripted to the effort, working alongside new arrivals from the Cooperative Workers' Party to reopen Selcaron's mines and feed the ravenous maw of the growing military industrial complex.

It was a grim and hopeless march onward, and each step forward presented new dangers and graver threats. And as always there was no guarantee that it wasn't all in vain.

Admiral Gorn checked the lines of his uniform one last time and pressed his hand to the door activator, the swish of pneumatic systems signaling the door's compliance. The trio of men awaiting in black Imperial uniforms wore the sign of this meeting's temperament squarely on their faces: they were not pleased to see the alien admiral.

“Gentlemen,” Gorn said shortly, gesturing to the small table, “shall we sit?” The Imperials, at least, seemed contented by the fact that the alien fish-man didn't intend to sit first, though military etiquette would call for it given his superior rank. “I must begin by reaffirming my orders, as given to me by the Cooperative Council of Defense, to deny any local or Imperial elements from entry into the Production Zones established by the Cooperative Army as a condition of the Cooperative's continued defense of this system.”

“This is a sovereign Imperial world―”

The overly tall Colonel's obviously preplanned tirade was cut short by a peculiar smacking sound from Gorn, a truly alien noise that stopped the Imperial cold. “And you have entered into a solemn agreement with the United Cooperative of Peoples. I am not a diplomat, I am not a traitor, and I am not a fool. I am a flag officer in the Cooperative Navy, so I will enforce that agreement by whatever means necessary. I can assure you that very soon you will see the fruit of the Cooperative's efforts here ripen, and you will not be disappointed at the doom it spells for our common Reaver foe.”

These were just words to the Imperials, hollow promises made out of an ill-conceived attempt to sway them from their duty as subjects of the Galactic Emperor. To Gorn, however, who knew full well the inner workings of the machine-complexes growing across Selcaron, these mere words were only a hair's breadth from becoming living action.

And on the day that the Guardian beast growing in the belly of Selcaron was called out of darkness and into the starlit field of battle, these Imperials would know that Gorn never spoke words emptied of truth.



On his way back to the groundside central command complex, Gorn stopped off at one of the army installation's comm stations, swiping his ID badge and punching in his own access codes.

“Penance Comm Control to Admiral Gorn, we're reading you loud and clear, Sir.” With a Reaver presence still active in the system, interplanetary and surface-to-space transmissions were restricted to military use only, and even then communications were restricted to relatively low-tech methods.

“I need you to relay a message to the Overseer through the Guardian Interlink.” With these precautions in place, interstellar communications were extremely limited. Even subspace transmissions were forbidden, as many feared the high power needed for complex communications might draw the Reavers' attention, perhaps even alert them to the Cooperative's Reaver tracking program, which also used subspace channels for data transmission. The only safe method was the Drackmarian-inspired Strategic Interlink, which restricted real-time communications to little more than text messages.

“Encode and transmit the following: the situation with the Imperials is worsening. I will do everything I can to preserve relations with the civilian populace, but I will not compromise this operation to avoid conflict with the Imperials on-world. This is war, and I know my duty.”







By now, even most commanders within the Cooperative secretly mocked Admiral Blakeley's unnatural attachment to his flagship, the Venator Star Destroyer Redemption. With access to Mon Calamari, Onyxian, TransGalMeg, and Coalition Second Wave warships, the admiral still clung to his relic from the Clone Wars. Though refits and upgrades had ensured it could hold its own in a modern engagement, the ship just felt old in this age of mark-five starship revisions and unimaginably alien craft.

But it filled space just as well as any ship, and that was all the Redemption Fleet had been tasked to do, “holding” the Cooperative-shared border of Reaver Space against possible incursions. But the Cooperative had kicked the nest at Maridun and Garos, and nothing had happened, nothing outward-oriented, at least. The Reavers, after their initial fight to hold onto their territory (and the hefty price the Cooperative payed), seemed content with the new order of things, two tiny blights within the vastness of their claimed territory. So Blakeley and his men sat dutifully in the depths of space, running regular drills, learning the intricacies of the Guardian System, and waiting for the Reaver assault that might never come.

Then the warning alarms sounded and the comm officer reported an incoming transmission, and Guardian set the whole fleet to battle stations, both the Admiral and the machine knowing that Reavers sometimes used brute-force jamming as a prelude to their attacks.

But the authentication checked out, the holoporjector activated, and the Admiral was greeted by the distastefully familiar blue-white image of the Overseer's avatar. As much as the admiral wanted to rail against the Overseer for endangering his fleet with a breech of communications protocols, he knew that the Overseer would only do so in the face of an even greater threat.

And that was far more terrifying than the possibility of a Reaver incursion.

Almost immediately the image dissolved, replaced by a map of the Quelii Sector and nearby Reaver Space. Red, curving arrows traced themselves through the region of Reaver Space, and the voice of the Overseer explained. “These are course mappings of those Reaver hunting parties we have tagged with subspace transcievers, representing Reaver movements over the past month.” Green arrows flashed into view, all angled in the same direction. “These are reports on those same Reaver groups, received over the past six hours.” The arrows extended in gold, showing projected course paths, all of them intersecting at a single point, well within the Quelii Sector.

“They're going to attack,” Blakeley said, terrified, fearing that his own homeworld might be the Reavers' target.

“You misunderstand, admiral. Subspace data transfer is subject to considerable latency.” The machine voice paused for a moment as Blakeley considered the implications. “The Reavers have already arrived.”

Gripping the guard rail tightly, images of his first encounter with the Reavers coming to mind, Blakeley steeled himself for the answer and asked: “Where?”

The face of the Overseer had returned. With eyes that betrayed a deep (if artificial) sorrow he answered: “Vahaba.”







“Understood,” General Sarris bowed, and the holoimage of the Avatar of Drackmar vanished. He and his fleet had just been ordered back to the Drackmarian Inner Sanctum, to redouble the war against the Confederacy.

“Ready the fleet for return to Drackmar. Inform Representative Mologg of our orders, that she may convey to our Cooperative allies―”

“Incoming transmission, General,” The comms officer reported, cutting off Sarris' orders. “Through the Strategic Interlink, text only, Cooperative authentication. We are ordered to respond to a threat of Reaver incursion upon a Cooperative world.” The officer looked up from his station, fear evident on his features.

Sarris understood. Drackmarian law was not written to accommodate outside alliances. He had been ordered by his Emperor to perform a task, and that order superseded all Drackmarian oaths. But Sarris' pledge to the Cooperative was no such oath. Without a formal rescission of his pledge, he remained bound by honor to defend the Cooperative from any common foe. He had a choice to make: refuse the order of his Emperor, an act equivalent to treason, or abandon his oath and become something less than Drackmarian.

This could not end well for the Drackmarian general.

It was called The Global Machine, and finally, truly, it was worthy of its name.

The World below him was much changed since his last visit. Remote uplink had become increasingly difficult given the strained state of the galactic HoloNet, requiring the Overseer of the Cooperative to travel personally to the installation to gain updates on its development.

And its development was staggering. The surface of this World had been transformed into a glittering network of autonomous systems. From orbit it seemed almost alive, a flood of billions of droids and machines washing over its surface, both fueling the transformative process of this world-turned-machine and servicing the finished products, the mines and factories and processing centers which converted the bounty of this World into the tools which would shape the future.

Patches of natural earth remained, not yet consumed and converted by the consciousness of the Global Machine, but they were shrinking rapidly. Soon the surface of this World would be consumed completely, and the Machine would expand downward, into the heart of the World. Already mine shafts ran deep beneath the upper crust, thermal collectors digging toward its molten core. Already the Global Machine had detected the imminent decrease in construction rates that would coincide with the total conversion of the World's surface, sending out seed ships to begin the colonization of the System's largest asteroids, ensuring that the Machine could continue to expand not only in physical production capacity, but in electronic processing capacity.

And that was the true marvel of this Global Machine: the Guardian hive consciousness that permeated every decision made, that drove every droid and piece of construction equipment, that operated every factory and ran every experiment. This was the most sophisticated computer in the galaxy: an entire planet built to think. To analyze, decipher, predict . . . and counter.

The Global Machine and its Global Mind.

And what that Mind showed to its Overseer would change them both forever.

The being called Smarts, the mind that ran the Overseer machine, marveled at the uncompromised truth that swelled within his consciousness, the revelation of the machine world that he now bore witness to.

As Smarts watched the logic tree grow, he marveled at the computational power of this Global Machine, this world-spanning Guardian who existed to decrypt the most vast of the galaxy's great puzzles. That it had turned its attentions to Smarts was somehow flattering, even as its revelations were sickening.

He could see it now, so plainly, just below the surface of his every action. This machine had done what he could not, and had done it through sheer processing power. It had looked into him, and it had solved his most guarded question: what am I?

Now he would have to live with the answer.

I've been such a fool.



It was a long journey back to the Cooperative “proper” from this secret fortress in the Unknown Regions, and he had much work to do before he arrived. He just hoped the Machine's forewarning had come in time.

He still struggled with the mass of data transmitted by the Global Machine, searching frantically for some error, hoping beyond hope that it was mistaken. But he knew he would find nothing out of place. The Global Machine was a Guardian, and Guardian did not err.

The Reavers were coming to Vahaba, and that was only the second greatest of his fears.

I have failed them. I have failed my Cooperative.

The closer he got to civilization, the more reliable communications became. The signals poured in like a flood: Athan, Traan, Draconis, Gorn, and so many more. A thousand voices, all clamoring to be heard, all calling on their Overseer to save them.

But he had no answers for them. He had no solutions, no just paths to guide them down. He had failed them, failed them in the most irreconcilable way possible. They each asked of him, and all that he could offer was, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I've failed you.”

But Vahaba. Vahaba he would not fail. This time he would not shrink from his duty. This time, he would not allow the shadow within him to darken the whole of the Cooperative.

And so the signals poured out like a flood: Chadra, Minntooine, Skor II, Charos IV, on and on the signals went. The cries for aid rang out. Vahaba had to be saved. Its people could not be sacrificed because of his weakness.

Vahaba had to be saved.



While Smarts rushed back to Varn and dispatched requests for assistance to Cooperative member worlds and their allies, he set into motion another, more absolute, means of relief.

Across all of the Cooperative, factories and shipyards had been building Hive Ships piece-by-piece, funneling them to the border of Reaver Space as opportunity allowed. Even within the confines of Reaver Space, on the worlds of Paradiso, Maridun, and Selcaron, the planets' natural resources were being extracted, processed, and utilized to manufacture such vessels. Their numbers swelled, counted not by tens or hundreds of ships, but by thousands and millions of individual components. They had waited, silent and ready, since their construction. Never had a Hive Ship been deployed for public operation. It was the Cooperative's greatest secret, their most vital safeguard against military incursion.

It was to be sacrificed for the future of the Vahaba colonists. The Guardian Hive Fleet had awakened, and it descended upon Vahaba as a divine wind.

Through sheer power alone, the proclamation rang out through the system: “We are Guardian, and we are many.”



By the time Smarts arrived at Varn, the fleet had already assembled. He docked with the Lucrehulk-class Control Ship without delay, interfacing systems, expanding his consciousness in preparation of the battle to come. But there was something he had to do before they could leave.

In a hundred voices and a thousand languages, the Overseer of the Cooperative spoke not only to those who would be following him into battle, but to the countless souls who had empowered him to lead. The signal transmitted across the fleet, across the surface of Varn, across the HoloNetwork which weaved the worlds of the Cooperative together.

“Brothers and sisters, companions in this great act of Cooperation, I have sworn oath to you all, to safeguard your freedom, to lead you into peace, to deliver you from despair. I have reshaped our great nation into the form you have required, I have driven lesser men aside to make way for the greatest among you to lead. I have raised up a bloodless army to defend your sacred lives. I have become executor of your collective will, the living embodiment of our Cooperative's ideals.

“I was created as an instrument of war, but I chose another path. I chose peace between peoples. I chose force in the smallest of measures. I chose the Cooperative, and to make it a reality, I took your choice away from you.” His tone grew dark, spiteful, bitter. “It was not a difficult task, to play on the emotions of organic beings, to guide the group-minds of our hive members, to manipulate the code of law which guides our Drackmarian allies.

“And always it was toward the greatest of ends: peace, prosperity, the illusion of liberty. I have made from dust and ash a nation of strength and fortitude.

The bitterness and anger gave way to sorrow and regret. “And in so doing I have failed you all. For I have stripped from you that thing which I most cherish for myself, and I have done it in the guise of self-sacrifice. This is not the Cooperative that I once loved. This abomination that I have made is a mockery of all that you stand for, and I hate myself for that. I wanted only peace for us. I wanted only hope and comfort. I have chased after those things to the exclusion of all else, and now we all reap what I have sown. For I cannot control you, your indomitable will, your unbent spirit. I have driven the Onyxians to rebellion, I have allowed the Reavers to grow and evolve, I have withheld our supporting hand to the Jedi whom you cry out to defend.

“I will do so no longer. I go now to pay the price demanded by my actions. I go now to set right a wrong. I go now to make manifest your righteous demands.

“There will be no more peace for me. You have demanded that evil be opposed, and I will no longer stand against the true will of this Cooperative. So I ask you, brothers, friends: will you follow me this one last time? Will you stand by me as I make my penance? Will you reap with me the error of my misguided dreams?”

They knew every word of it to be true. And with eyes opened to their Overseer's schemes, the warriors of the Cooperative answered. Some grim, some reluctant, some filled with hope and some with fear. But in a thousand tongues and a million voices, the warriors of Cooperative pledged their service anew, not to the Overseer who would be a god among men, but to the Cooperative which they all now truly served, the idea which transcends flesh and steel.

“Then I say this now to you, and you must know that it is true: you are the great Guardian of Cooperative. You, who serve this cause beyond us all. You, who believe even beyond hope and reason. You, who stand bold and proud before a fate worse than death. You, whose sacrifice cannot be measured in tons of steel, in billions of credits, who pay the price with your mortal lives and intangible souls.

“This machine I have made―that is made from me―is but a tool in your hands. So go now, Guardians of all that is right, and put us guardian-machines to use.

“To Vahaba! To the pledge we will not forsake!”

The Guardian Fleet of the Cooperative vanished into the abyss, prepared in war to uphold an oath made in peace.

Prepared in knowledge to reap what in ignorance was sown.

They were called Guardian, and they were indeed many. They smashed against the Reaver lines with a driving boldness the likes of which Admiral Corise Lucerne had never seen.

And the fires of their first volleys reawakened something deep within his spent body. One voice sounded out above all others, compelling Corise to sit upright in his chair, his eyes to scan his display screens. I have to live.

“Evasive maneuvers. Discontinue self-destruct countdowns. Comms, can we make contact with the Coalition ships?”

“Reaver jamming is saturating the channels, Sir. That Coalition transmission was a brute-force message; we can't get close to its signal strength. But . . . most of their ships seem to be communicating with some sort of blink code, though its far too complex to get a reliable read on. We may be able to signal them with one of the more basic, universal spacer codes. Shall I inform them of our status, Sir?”

Minor alarms were already sounding. The Reaver virus was infiltrating the outer compartments of the ship. Not much longer and it would begin to affect vital systems.

“No. Inform them that I am Admiral Corise Lucerne of the Contegorian Confederation and that our vessel carries a weapon capable of destroying the Reaver virus. We are to be defended at all cost.”

“Sir?”

A smug smile crossed the admiral's face and his gaze snapped to the tactical officer. “Initiate shipwide lockdown. Seal all blast doors and activate quarantine protocols. Disable all system interlinks and initiate mechanical separation of all primary systems to the ship's outer sections.” The admiral interrupted himself by typing a short string of commands into his command display. “This is the Amiral to engineering, respond.”

“Chief Russel here, Sir. What can I do for you?”

“I need a controlled override of the quarantine protocols. Seal off environmental systems to the outer compartments and divert the reactor exhaust into them.”

“What!” A crewman at one of the minor tech stations couldn't contain his shock. “We have crewmen in those sections!”

The admiral sneered at the interruption, standing upright to give himself a clear line of sight on the crewman. He drew his blaster and fired in a smooth, casual motion. “Chief Russel?”

“Complying now, Admiral . . . Sir, does this mean we're going to make it out of this?”

Admiral Lucerne had already disregarded the corpse, holstering his blaster and retaking his seat. “I'll do my best, Chief.” He closed the channel and returned his attention to tactical. “Activate automated defense systems. The weapons' operations teams won't be alive much longer.”

Hard radiation was the only thing experimentally shown to slow or destroy the Reaver virus at its most basic levels. Waste radiation from the main reactor may not destroy the Reaver infection completely, but it would definitely buy them time.

And as long as the Guardian didn't know Estralla had been infected, Admiral Lucerne and the surviving members of his crew had a chance.






They were called Guardian, and they were indeed many.

But the Reavers, they, too, were many. Too many.

Guardian could not win this battle. It had no hope of destroying the massive Reaver swarm which had descended upon the entire solar system. But of course, that wasn't its purpose.

The Guardian Hive Fleet of the United Cooperative of Systems made of itself a living shield against the Reaver advance. Behind that wall of machine defenders, the survivors of the Vahaba Colonies sheltered. As the Overseer had commanded, the Vahaba Colonies would not be allowed to perish. Even if every settlement was infected, even if the entire system were rendered uninhabitable, the people of the Vahaba Colonies would live on. And so Vahaba would live on.

This was Guardian's charge. This was its duty. To preserve the individual lives which collectively made up a culture. To save a society from extinction.

And so Guardian battled on, fighting its futile campaign against the still-swelling Reaver ranks. The line would hold, Guardian would hold, until every survivor of Vahaba had been carried beyond the Reaver interdiction and evacuated to safety.

The Hive Fleet would perish.

Vahaba would live on.







“Dammit, waive them off!”

The Guardian ships were pressing too close. If they got a clear sensor reading, they might detect the Reaver infection. The irradiated outer hull was doing its job for now; all quarantine seals to vital ship sections remained intact. But it was only a matter of time before the infection spread, and if the Coalition ships realized that, then Estralla wouldn't be allowed to leave the system.

He needed something to distract this Guardian intelligence, something to force it to change its strategy and buy him the time he needed to break away and escape.

And then he saw it.

His hands set to work at fantastic speed, accessing tactical, sensor, and even navigational data as Corise searched for confirmation.

“Sir?” One of his officers had noticed his access into their system.

Corise kept working. He didn't have time to explain.

“Sir, what are you doing?”

He glanced up, then stopped a moment later, raising his head again to inspect the crew more closely. They were all staring at him.

“Sir, are you okay?”

Corise smiled, entering a last few commands to shift his findings to the main viewscreen. “We should be dead by now. There's a reason we have gunnery crews, people to sit at the stations and fire the weapons: our automated systems are objectively inferior to living, trained gunners.” He pointed at the display. “Then why are our automated systems suddenly doing so well against the Reavers, when the Coalition's custom-designed, integrated AI fleet is getting hammered by them?”

He smiled broadly, tapping another key to change the mash of sensor readings on the screen to something more recognizable. The debris cloud of the Reaver moon-ship floated at the front of the bridge.

“You think that Reaver mass was coordinating them?”

“No,” Corise said, still grinning like a madman. “I think it was thinking for them. We're seeing a localized disruption of the Reaver forces in the area directly around Estralla, the area that ship would have been controlling. These Reavers, this group here, has adopted some sort of hierarchy. And we just took out one of the top rungs, leaving the peons to scamper around us without a thought for themselves.”

Guardian couldn't have known. The Reaver ship had been destroyed before the Coalition fleet had arrived. To its machine mind, that was just another cloud of debris in the middle of a battlefield. It couldn't possibly have worked out the irregularity on its own.

“Comms, inform Guardian of our discovery. Tell it if it really wants to buy time against the Reavers, it needs to penetrate their lines and assault the Reaver masses directly. Tell it we're swinging wide to assault one of the constructs on the edge of the Reaver formation.

“And helm, plot a course that looks like we're following through, but break for open space once we're clear of the main Reaver cloud.”

As Estralla disengaged from the disoriented Reaver cluster, Corise's heart began to thud with the excitement of the moment. They were going to make it out of this. He was going to live.

You can't abandon these people. You have a duty to uphold! You gave your word!

Corise smirked at the inward voice. It was weak. Feeble. Defeated. Corise Lucerne was going to live. Vahaba be damned.

“Reversions detected!”

“No!” Corise shouted, unable to contain his rage.

The comm lines opened once again and Corise heard a voice which shattered all of his hopes: “I am Overseer and Supreme Commander of the United Cooperative of Peoples. The Guardian Fleet has come to see the citizens of the Vahaba Colonies safely away and defend your homes from the Reaver infestation.”

The message continued, the Overseer's next works turning Corise's stomach. “Admiral Lucerne, the Hive Guardian has informed me of your presence and that you are in possession of a weapon with which to purge the Reaver infestation. I thank you for your service thus far, that you have honored our alliance even in the midst of such a terrible situation.”

It wasn't what the Overseer had said. It wasn't even that he knew Corise was here. It was that the Guardian Fleet had reverted right in front of Estralla. There would be no sneaking away from this battle.







It wasn't enough. Admirals Blakeley and Gorn had arrived with their Reaver defense fleets, falling into line beside the Hive and Guardian fleets. Exempting the local planetary defense forces of the CDF and the various minor Cooperative task forces deployed throughout the galaxy, the collective naval might of the Cooperative had gathered at Vahaba.

And it wasn't enough.

Smarts had been considering the information that the Hive Guardian had relayed concerning the massive Reaver constructs which dotted the Vahaba Asteroid Belt. And he finally had a plan.

The last of the Vahaba civilians had finally been evacuated. What little remained of their snub fleet had been allowed to fall back and withdraw. Admiral Lucerne refused to join one of the main battle groups, sticking to a tactic of weaving through the asteroid belt which had apparently kept him and his ship alive all of this time. He said that a Cooperative escort would only draw more attention to Estralla and disrupt her maneuvers, and Smarts was willing to concede the points for now. But soon he would need Estralla's incredible firepower.

Because as of five minutes ago, there was nothing left in the system for Guardian to guard. Still trapped by the Reaver interdiction, that left Smarts with only one course of action to take.

The signal burst traveled so quickly over the relatively short distance as to be instantaneous. As one, the Guardian-equipped vessels of the Cooperative Navy shed their defensive protocols and embraced the pure militancy of Smarts' original design.

Guardian had ceased to be.

The Avenger Protocol was active.

The proclamation sounded immediately: “We are Avenger: perish, Reavers.”

With the Guardian base restraint to preserve life at the expense of automated assets stripped away, Avenger was free to weigh its options strictly in terms of military value. The manned vessels of the Cooperative Navy now held no more intrinsic value than their automated Hive Ship counterparts. And now, collectively, they had one goal: the eradication of their enemy.

The reduction of the invading Reavers to stains of blood and wisps of vapor.

The combined fleets of the Cooperative crashed against the Reavers with a renewed fervor, tearing into the Reaver lines in a precisely orchestrated mass-maneuver to open the Reaver lines and render their massive command hubs vulnerable.

Smarts allowed himself to submit to the incredible power of the Avenger hive consciousness, to be swept away by its harsh, mechanical rationality. He surrendered his inspired will to the cause, allowing himself to merge with the trillions of computations and projections which guided the military intelligence, to forget the thousands of faces of those who had trusted him.

He held on to only a single thought, allowed his fabricated emotion to find refuge beneath one truth: if they failed here, now, then billions more would suffer for it. This horrible thing he had unleashed might just be the only thing with the will to stave off a greater horror.







The Outer Fleet of Drackmar's Realm reverted from hyperspace with one objective: to preserve the alliance between Emperor Draconis and the Cooperative. But the sight which lay before it brought even General Sarris to the brink of terror.

The Cooperative fleets were mingled with the Reaver swarm, ships trading fire in all directions. Space was littered with debris, hundreds of derelicts from both sides of the engagement. Several massive Reaver made-ships were taking heavy fire, some of them receiving horrific damage as Cooperative vessels collided directly with them.

But as the Drackmarian fleet closed to render what assistance it could, Sarris' keen eyes picked out patterns in the chaos, carefully orchestrated maneuvers involving a fleet's worth of Cooperative ships. He knew immediately that this was not Guardian, that this was something unimaginably worse, the very thing which the Drackmarians had feared since their first contact with the droid-consciousness which called itself Smarts. The machines had taken over, their cold efficiency being trusted above living intuition, the immediate horror of loss being superseded by the Grand Scheme which such complex machine processes allowed for.

The same path had almost destroyed the Drackmarian Empire in its own past. Now, watching history repeat itself, Sarris knew what he had to do. “Take us in. We have lives to save.” Still, as he watched the battle and familiarized himself with the Cooperative's combat patterns, his military mind had to appreciate the efficiency of the endeavor. Even against such overwhelming numbers, the Cooperative fleets were wreaking havoc on the waves of Reaver ships.

The fleets of the Cooperative were burning, but the Reavers were burning with them.

Flagging non-hostile assets for reliance-compatibility

Processing . . .

Processing . . .

Processing . . .

Military Group: Drackmarian Outer Fleet

Commander: General Sarris

Avenger Reliability Rating: 375, error margin 27

Sarris' fleet hung at the edge of the battle, firing its heavy cannons not at Avenger-assigned targets, but in a pattern apparently intended to suppress the most dangerous threats to Admiral Blakeley's Redemption Fleet.

The arrival of the Drackmarians and their refusal to adopt the current Cooperative battle strategy had resulted in a marked shift in the overall Reaver posture. As Avenger processed the raw data, filtering the compiled information through Smarts' unique and unreproducible analytic systems, it began to derive patterns of activity in the Reaver mass that were . . . familiar.

That the Reaver force which had invaded the Vahaba System had absorbed significant sources of Cooperative military technology in the past was undeniable. While Guardian failsafes had ensured the software of infected ships had not been accessed by the Reavers (this was evident by the reduced efficiency of the Reavers' capacity to anticipate Avenger's tactics), the development of these massive composite vessels and the hierarchical organization of the Reavers in-system showed that this group of Reavers had adapted the Guardian hardware to suit their needs.

If Avenger had had the spare processing power at the time and certain non-combat-specific Guardian subprograms operational, it would certainly pursue the theory that the significant size of this Reaver force was directly resultant from a tendency of Guardian-adapted Reavers to gather, to assemble specifically together with one another.

But Avenger had neither the time on hand nor the requisite processes enabled to explore such things, so it took at the Overseer's subdued urging that preliminary theory as operational truth.

Yet acceptance of such a claim as reality failed to alter the situation: on-hand assets were insufficient to the task. Vital assets failed to submit to the operational authority of Avenger. General Sarris would not cooperate. Avenger would not succeed in its task.

As the focused attacks on the primary Reaver constructs had progressed, the brute-force Reaver jamming had begun to break down and the military transmitters of the Cooperative and Drackmarian forces were now capable of limited communication.

And so it came about that the transmission from the command ship of the Drackmarian fleet to the flag of Admiral Jonathan Blakeley was relayed to Avenger:

“Admiral, I must insist that you disengage from this strategy and begin a withdrawal of your forces under our protective fire. Your ships are sustaining heavy damage and you cannot survive much longer. Do not allow this machine to kill your men.”

The action forced Avenger to reassess General Sarris' status as a non-hostile . . .

. . .

. . .

His status was reconfirmed. Under the statutes of the Cooperative-Drackmarian Treaty, General Sarris had not yet committed a treasonous act.

The admiral's response was short, grim, and suggested that failure here would mean the fall of the sector. He refused to abandon his station.

Avenger returned the sum of its attention to countering the most recent Reaver maneuver; they were attempting to reorganize after the loss of another of their command vessels.





The Greater Hive



The reversion to realspace was premature. Yoggoy checked the instrumentation available and realized that artificial gravity wells had initialized the hyperdrive failsafes.

“We are Yoggoy. We are of the Kind. We are Killik. Life is sacred, and we defend it.”

The quartet of Shard-class capital ships opened their hive doors and unleashed a swarm of unshielded dartships into the battle. Their escort of Colicoid and Xi Charrian frigates and light warships surged ahead, eager to render what assistance they could while the larger, slower vessels lumbered forward.







Flagging non-hostile assets for reliance-compatibility

Processing . . .

Processing . . .

Processing . . .

Military Group: unidentified Cooperative composite force

Commander: uncertain, speculate Yoggoy group consciousness

Avenger Reliability Rating: indeterminate, speculate 700-830

Warnings flared in Avenger's networked consciousness as sensor data confirmed that the swarm of Yoggoy fightercraft were unshielded, and had already been exposed to the mutated Reaver clouds which filled local space. It was only a matter of time before the Yoggoy capital ships and their fighters fell to the Reaver infestation.

Combat tables had to be recalculated, destructive capacities had to be reestimated. Avenger had to determine whether or not it could win now, and approximate the time until the Yoggoy forces would be absorbed by the Reavers.





The Alliance of Corporate States



They had expected to arrive late. They had expected an unfriendly sight to await them.

They could not have expected this.

It wasn't immediately evident where the Reaver numbers stopped and the Cooperative formation started. They were locked in intense, short-range, high-mobility combat. It was a starfighter furball, but scaled up to capital ships and already having lasted far too long.

“This is Commodore Solaris of the Alliance of Corporate States' Joint Task Force, arriving in response to a general hail for assistance from the Overseer of the United Cooperative of Systems. We stand ready to render whatever assistance we are able.”

She just hoped it wasn't all for naught.





The Quelii Sector Combine



The hodgepodge assemblage of starships which reverted soon after the Alliance task force added another set of variables to Avenger's continued attempts to derive a new, more effective course of action.

“I am General Valance Lomax, acting commander of the Quelii Sector Combine Fleet, arriving in response to a perceived threat to the safety and integrity of the Quelii Sector. I do not recognize nor submit to the authority of the Cooperative over this fleet, and will render only what assistance I deem appropriate according to my own conviction and my commitment to the Interim Parliament of the Quelii Sector Combine.”







Avenger latched onto the new arrivals and sent them straight toward the fray. They weren't proper Cooperative military vessels, and so weren't equipped with Guardian, but they would prove valuable nonetheless.

As the battle wore on and the Greater Hive, Corporate Alliance, and Quelii Sector forces fell into place, deployed around the Drackmarians to erect a sort of screen while Avenger disengaged some of the more heavily damaged of the Cooperative's craft from the main engagement and withdrew them behind the friendly defensive line, the probabilities of some sort of success began to grow.

But the danger posed by this particular adaptation of the Reaver virus could not be ignored. The combination of a Guardian-inspired hierarchy and an evolving ability to strip raw materials and repurpose them for repairs and possibly some form of manufacturing meant that driving these Reavers off may prove more detrimental in the long term than allowing them their foothold in the Vahaba System. Yet, Avenger could not destroy them now. The Reaver numbers were simply too great, and Avenger's own assets too limited.

And then they arrived.







Admiral Panacka found himself adjusting his rank insignia, as if the droid he was about to address might get offended that the military commander of the Eastern Fleet, in the midst of a combat reversion, didn't have all of the lines of his uniform in proper order.

Then, he snickered at his own foolishness and clasped his hands behind his back, willing himself to face this moment as he had so many times before.

The starlines streaked by, the system resolved itself in front of him, and with one glance at the field of battle, he addressed himself to the Cooperative commander.

“This is Admiral Panacka, acting commander of the Coalition Eastern Guardian Fleet. I understand you guys could use some help?”

As soon as the line closed, Panaka let a slight grin creep across his face. “Captain, go ahead and make us look big and scarey.”







It was clear now to Avenger that the Reavers would be repulsed, but not destroyed. With that eventuality determined, the operational priorities of the Avenger System dictated the necessity of preserving all remaining military assets possible. That meant immediately extricating the main body of the Cooperative fleet from the Reaver engagement.

All across the battlefield, Guardian Hive Ships reconfigured themselves, the most heavily damaged segments grouping together and making a dash for open space while the remainder adapted defensive postures to escort crewed vessels or, in the worst cases, to encase damaged vessels entirely and physically remove them from the heart of the battle.

As the Eastern force closed with the main engagement and their firepower became of notable effect, General Sarris and the combat groups around him spread out and took more active postures to support Avenger's withdrawal order.

Finally, the machine-will was yielding to the laws of life. The crews of the Cooperative fleets would be spared from the single minded bloodlust of the Avenger abomination.







Avenger was not satisfied with the determined course of action, but no other viable alternatives existed. The Reaver force was collapsing inward, forming a dense ball and dropping their interdiction fields in anticipation of a full-scale withdrawal.

The Cooperative forces had dealt heavy damage to several of the Reaver command constructs and had managed to destroy a few of them, but the overall Reaver force had become rather adept at restructuring itself to close command gaps, and with each of the massive vessels destroyed, there was one fewer that the Reavers had to distribute themselves among in order to defend.

As the two forces began to break away, each one aware that the other couldn't do sufficient damage in time to justify the effort of remaining, Avenger began to wonder how it had performed, what fate would be decided for it at battle's end. Most would undoubtedly consider it a perversion of Guardian, a vile and heartless twisting of the intended design. But in truth, Avenger was the purest form of Guardian, a machine built to wage war. It had been authorized by the Cooperative Council of Defense, and the Overseer had followed the prescribed rules of conduct in deploying it . . . surely its failure to destroy the Reavers here could not be held against it? After all, it simply hadn't had the necessary resources on hand.

Multiple reversion detections alerted Avenger to a changing tactical situation, and all such passive thoughts immediately ceased to free up processing power.

A massive wave of reversions heralded the arrival of a new and substantial fleet, and as Avenger's networked consciousness reeled with the implications, a simple holoimage conveyed the essence of what was unfolding at Vahaba:

Prime Minister Regrad smiled kindly out at the solar system. “I always seem to arrive late, Overseer, but I always manage to make it when it counts. The Compact Fleet is at your disposal. We await your orders.”

The unimaginable event was sufficient to jar Smarts out of his submerged state, to reassert proper control over the Avenger system and reacquire personal command of the Cooperative fleets. And seeing the lay of the field, he knew exactly what he had to do. With the Avenger Protocol enabled and access to its immense processing power assured by the collapse of the Reaver jamming network and the Cooperative's superior communications lines, Smarts' mind burned with the weight of this decision.

“All ships, all crews: engage interdictor field generators. Envelop the Reaver force and concentrate all firepower on the Reaver constructs. All fighters and bombers, assault those primary targets. Contain the Reavers, disrupt their command hierarchy, purge them from the system. Allow none to escape.

“This is the Overseer: Avenge Vahaba.”







The order had forced the battered and worn forces of the Cooperative Fleet to turn about and openly reengage the Reavers. With the massive Compact Fleet having arrived from galactic north-east, the Eastern Fleet arriving from the south, and the Drackmarian-led support line causing the Cooperative forces to gather on the west, the combined forces at Vahaba were positioned to contain and eradicate the Reaver fleet.

Now, Smarts just had to ensure that everyone played their part. Avenger was sufficient to the task, but only if its orders were followed.

“Admiral Blakeley, the Reaver orientation for withdrawal has placed the Cooperative forces in a tactically superior position. We must close with the Reavers, penetrate their lines, and assault their command constructs directly. All fast attack vessels from the Redemption and Penance fleets are to break formation and join with fast-attack elements of the Guardian fleet for an immediate run on vulnerable targets. The remainder of our forces will make best possible speed to reengage the Reaver lines.

“General Sarris, your slower vessels and the support forces arrayed around you are to offer ranged support and follow us in at your best possible speed.

“Prime Minister, the Compact Fleet must break above and below the plane of the ecliptic and ensure that the Reavers do not escape the closing net.

“Admiral Panacka, as the Eastern Guardian is not equipped with the Avenger Protocol, its reliability in direct assault is, quite frankly, nonexistent. Deploy along the perimeter of the battle, hold that flank, and ensure the Reavers do not escape.”

The replies came in waves. General Sarris pleaded once more with Admiral Blakeley to break formation and save his men. The Admiral, for his part, refused yet again.

Admiral Panacka, having just realized what state Avenger had put the Cooperative forces in, pled for the Prime Minister to claim operational command and stop the Overseer's plan.

Prime Minister Regrad, with the various commanders of the Compact Fleet's constituent elements awaiting his reply, turned a grim face on the forces of the system's defenders and pledged to follow the Overseer's strategy through to its end. There was simply too much at stake here. The Reavers had to be stopped.

Estralla



“That's it! We're free! The Coalition is engaging a new interdictor net, but we're outside of its range. Admiral, we made it.”

Admiral Corise Lucerne studied the incoming data closely, marveling at the scale of the forces arrayed against the Reaver incursion. The holes were closing up, the containing sphere of warships was encapsulating the Reavers. But there were still weak points, places that the Reavers may yet break through if they could react quickly enough.

“Admiral, should we give the order to withdraw?”

Estralla had remained fairly safe in the asteroid belt. After informing Avenger that the ship's main gun was offline due to complications with its experimental technology, the droid command consciousness had all but forgotten about the lone Confederation ship. The Confederation task force within the Compact Fleet did not yet seem aware of Estralla's presence, so the true identity of the crew wasn't yet in question.

But they were running out of time. Systems were failing all through the ship, the Reaver infection spreading like a wildfire. Little more than the bridge and main engineering remained uninfected, and the command and communications lines between the two were certainly on the verge of being lost.

There might be just enough life left in her to get her crew to a nearby world. The command-level escape pods were shielded; they could probably carry the surviving crew to safety.

He had done it. Corise Lucerne had brought his crew to freedom.

A new transmission from the Cooperative Overseer interrupted Corise's thoughts: “Admiral Lucerne, the Reavers are amassing for a break toward the asteroid belt. We require the use of Estralla's main cannon to destroy the primary Reaver command construct within that arm of the formation. Can you disrupt the Reavers long enough for us to reinforce the position and preserve containment?”

Corise snickered at the Overseer's message, the droid's pitiful plea conjuring up images of valiant and foolish sacrifice on the part of Estralla and her crew, a daring and fatal effort to shore up a failed strategy. It was pathetic.

It dropped him to his knees.

The admiral let out a grunt of pain, elbows propped on his thighs, hands clutching his head.

“Admiral?” the helmsman asked weakly, turning in his station to see what was happening.

With an agonizing yell Corise fell on his side, trying to roll onto his knees to sit up again. But he let out another shout, and fell onto his back, arms going limp at his sides.

“Get us the hell out of here!” one of the other officers shouted. “Helm, turn us about. Plot a course for hyperjump.”

“No.” It was barely discernible as more than a grunt. Drawing his hands close to his sides, Admiral Lucerne propped himself into a sitting position, his head moving slowly as he took in his environment.

“Admiral, Sir, do you need help?”

Corise held up one hand, stopping the offer cold. He collected his feet under himself and slowly rose off of the deck, giving the bridge another once-over before a small nod punctuated a total shift in demeanor.

His posture straightened, his weak-kneed stance strengthened, his face turned to a grim mask of determination. The admiral brought his commlink to his mouth and clicked to the shipwide channel. “All hands, this is the Admiral. Abandon ship. When you're clear of Estralla, hail the Coalition fleet and request political asylum. Don't let those Confederation bastards take you back. I promised you your freedom; this is the best I can do.”







Yoggoy was in a frenzy. The Reaver infection had moved quickly through the largely unshielded asteroids-turned-warships, affecting ships systems, certainly, but more importantly: converting the crew. The several tens of thousands of Killik drones manning each ship were now engaged in violent, bloody combat. The fact that wounds suffered by one side could turn them to the other was having a deciding influence on the outcome of the battle.

And then the message came: “Yoggoy, I am the Overseer. Your weapon placements have stopped firing. Your ships are listing off-course. Based on available data, probabilities indicate that you will lose complete control of ships' functions in only a few minutes time. This is very important. I need you to do as I say. You have to set a collision course with the nearest of the Reaver constructs and then destroy your guidance and attitude control systems, and initiate core overloads in each of your vessels. If you fail, then the Reavers will escape . . .

“Yoggoy, respond.”

Aboard the ships of the Yoggoy force, in the corridors and workstations stained with Reaver-infected blood, the few remaining uninfected crew answered in their complex, buzzing, clicking language. “We are of the Kind, and the Kind will endure. We are of the Kind, and the Kind will endure. We are of the Kind, and the Kind will endure.”

As the chant grew louder and the Killik pressed with renewed vigor against their Reaver brethren, the infected began to join in. The Will of the Kind pressed against the Reaver infection, compelling obedience from every drone onboard. In a frenzy of snapping mandibles and blood-curdling shrieks, they shambled through the corridors, tearing at each other, at themselves, at the machinery of the warships, but ultimately setting about the Overseer's command.

As minor explosions began to erupt from within the vessels, finally a voice reached out from the damned ships and answered the Overseer's plea.

“We are of the Kind. We survive. We endure. We . . . are . . . Guardians.

“. . .

“Reavers . . .

“Reavers . . .

“Reavers . . . Reavers . . . Reavers . . .”

But it was too late. The damage was already done. The Killik Shard ships plunged into their target, erupting in a plume of fire and shrapnel that burned it hollow and shattered it to pieces.







“I die the man my soul longs to be, the man my memories tell me I am.”

The voice was harsh, strained, broken. There was nothing of joy or hope left in it, only the cold dark of duty which must be fulfilled.

“My name is Corise Lucerne, but I am not the man you know.

“I am his clone. My crew . . . we all are clones. We have been held, against our will, by the government of the Contegorian Confederation. We were experimented upon in varied manners and to varied degrees. The purposes of our creation and of what we have been forced to endure remain unknown to us.”

The voice changed. The pain lessened, and a resoluteness entered in its place.

“Estralla has been compromised by the Reaver infestation. Her surviving crew is evacuating in shielded escape capsules. Our main weapon is offline and primary systems are failing throughout the ship. I will pilot Estralla into the target and channel reactor energy directly into the main cannon's energy conversion matrix. The resulting explosion should have the desired effect.

“I do this thing for you, Overseer, not because I believe it will work―I have no idea if it will work: I made the people of Vahaba an oath, and now it will be fulfilled.”

Again, the voice broke. Its strength failed and there was only despair remaining. “There are others, others I could not save. Others I did not try to save. I'm transmitting the coordinates of the Confederation base from which we escaped to you.

“Don't let them get away with it. Don't let them keep doing this.”

The response was machine-quick and completely unexpected. “Admiral, I have to know: how did you know the Reavers were coming to Vahaba?”

Corise Lucerne looked down at his hands, turned them palm-up in front of himself. He squeezed his eyes shut as he clinched his fists. “I just . . . saw it.”

The castoff from the explosion carried some of the blast's peculiar energy into the surrounding formation, disintegrating several Reaver ships and carving a neat hole in the advancing force.







The Reavers had detected the weakness in the closing net, and had thrown their full weight into exploiting it. The Killik's and Estralla's sacrifices had narrowed the corridor of escape, leaving only one avenue open to them.

With their command constructs falling to the withering fire of the multinational forces present, the Reaver fleet was quickly losing integrity. Soon it would be unable to coordinate any escape effort.

They had time for one final spearhead.

The Reaver force was swelling toward the Cooperative fleet, heavily damaged by its protracted engagement with the enemy. Recognizing Admirals Blakeley and Gorn wouldn't challenge the Overseer's course of action, General Sarris had brought the Drackmarians into the Cooperative's main battle line, to help protect their damaged ships. The general was clearly repulsed by the course of the battle, but his sense of duty prevented him from abandoning his living allies.

A trio of the Redemption Fleet's medium warships broke formation and accelerated toward the approaching Reaver swarm, prompting Blakeley to curse wildly and then acquire a commlink with the squadron commander.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The ranking captain replied with stoic coldness. “Admiral, we've received orders from the Overseer to initiate a suicide run on the Reaver command ship to disrupt the command hierarchy of the approaching Reavers and blunt their assault on our main lines.”

“What? No! Absolutely not!”

“Admiral,” the imposing voice of the Overseer intruded into the communication. “We cannot withstand a coordinated assault from the Reavers. This is our only option. We must break the Reavers, here and now.”

“No! I will fight for you however you dictate, Overseer, but I will not stand by an allow you to do this to my men! We are soldiers! There are rules to what we do and how we conduct ourselves! We have obligations to our men, obligations which run far deeper than your combat projections. Captain, turn your ships around. Comms, signal the fleet to pull back. We are withdrawing from the engagement. Inform Vice-Admiral Gorn that I suggest he do the same.”

“Admiral, I am ordering you―”

“Stop.” Hearing the unexpected voice of General Sarris intrude into the argument was enough to make everyone comply. “There will be consequences for this, Overseer. Consequences that your machines cannot predict.”

The flagship of the Drackmarian fleet broke formation and began moving forward, her substantial mass preventing her from rapid acceleration, but her engines were sufficient to carry her into the approaching path of the Reavers before they became entangled with the Cooperative formation yet again.

“General, no!” Admiral Blakeley's plea was weak, pathetic. He couldn't begin to guess why Sarris was doing this, but he knew he wouldn't be able to change the Drackmarian's mind.

“You've carried this too far already, Overseer. I will not allow the lives you threw away here to have been given in vain. I will give you your victory today, but tomorrow you will see how shortly your farsighted plans collapse.

“I die a servant of Drackmar. May he show mercy on you for what you have brought me to.”

Aftermath

Vahaba was still burning. It would be for the foreseeable future. The sacrifices of the the Yoggoy nest, Corise Lucerne, and General Sarris had fractured and disorganized the spearhead of the Reaver escape effort, buying the combined fleets the time they needed to finish their task. With the last of the Reaver command constructs destroyed, the Reavers in-system had fallen into complete disarray. What remained of their numbers were reduced to so much flotsam over the next several hours, the Coalition's Second Wave vessels chasing down the few vessels who managed to escape the primary containment area, the combined interdiction fields of the various fleets holding the main fragments of the Reaver force in-system until they could be dismantled piecemeal.

A few ships had managed to escape, carrying the knowledge of what had happened here back into Reaver Space, to be propagated throughout the general Reaver population.

Dozens of allied warships had had to be abandoned, the Reaver infestation too advanced to purge and save the vessels themselves. Crews were evacuated, deep-space quarantine zones established for decontamination and―when necessary―scuttling of ships too far gone to be saved.

Admiral Panacka returned to the East as soon as his fleet was safe from the threat of the Reaver infection, concerned that the Reavers may launch a counter-attack in response to the massive blow they had just suffered at Vahaba.

But no attack came. So total was the destruction of the Reaver force, so overwhelming was the firepower brought to bear against them, so ruthless was the execution of the Avenger Protocol, that the Reavers as a whole seemed to have gone into a general state of withdrawal, not wishing to incur further retribution for the time being.

The Cooperative Navy, for its part, had suffered heavily. The Hive Fleet, making its first public appearance under emergency orders from the Overseer, had been decimated by protracted conflict, first under the guiding hand of Guardian in an attempt to safeguard the evacuation of the surviving native population, then as the spearhead of Avenger's offensive, and finally as the rearguard of the combined Cooperative forces' withdrawal from the heart of the conflict.

The composition of the Hive Ships had led Avenger to adapt a tactic of utilizing individual infected Scales as kinetic weapons against the Reavers, hurling the objects at targets of opportunity before operational control was lost, their reactors building toward overload and self-destruct. The tactic had resulted in massive overall damage, but had drastically reduced the size of the Hive Fleet by battle's end.

Similarly, the standardized forces of the Cooperative Navy had taken heavy losses, though the inherent resistance of ship and formation commanders to throw themselves into outright suicide runs had led to significantly lower loss rates than among the Cooperative's completely automated craft.

The larger overall composition of the Guardian Fleet and presence of the Guardian command ship itself had seen a lower overall damage and destroyed rate within the Overseer's personal command than within the smaller forces of Admiral Blakeley and Vice Admiral Gorn. By battle's end, Gorn's flagship, the Mon Calamari Cruiser Penance, was all but destroyed, forcing the crew to evacuate and a Hive Ship to tow her out of the Reaver infection zone. After hours of deck-by-deck radiation purging, the chances that she could be salvaged were growing slim.

The Prime Minister seemed rather reserved, and had made little effort to contact the Overseer personally since the battle's end. Reports suggested he was busy with the Confederation commander within the Compact Fleet over the issue of Estralla's surviving crew, whom the Cooperative had granted asylum and immediately whisked away to a secure location.

The Vahaba System itself was a total loss. The Reaver infection saturated the asteroids , planets, and even space of the system, and as the debris fields began to bleed off thermal energy from the battle, definite active power sources were detected within the wreckage of the battle. Even with its ships gone and command structure destroyed, the individual particles of the Reaver infection continued their work, trying to stitch the wreckage back together into usable warships. Most of what was left of the Hive Fleet was being assigned to a sort of long-term cleanup duty, policing the system and destroying pockets of Reaver activity. At present, the best hope was that specialized vessels could be used to irradiate whole sections of the battlefield at a time, and that specially prepared Squib and Ugor salvage fleets would be able to harvest the inert debris and carry it out of system. The process would be slow and dangerous, but the only alternative would be to leave the system alone and allow the Reavers to repurpose the wreckage to their use. And then what would the sacrifices of the past weeks have been for?

It was all a mess. Everything they had worked for was on the verge of spiraling into chaos.

And then the shuttle landed. Admiral Jonathan Blakeley stepped onto the deck of the Lucrehulk-class Core Ship Smarts alone, in the same admiral's uniform he had been wearing since his entering the battle, wearing his exhaustion and rage plainly in his features.

He stormed silently through the hallways of the machine-ship, ignoring every droid and system that he passed, stepping through opening doors before they had fully receded into the walls, his footfalls rapid despite his obvious weariness.

Finally he made it to the ship's former bridge, the empty observation deck where the droid Beta now stood, alone. “It's over. I'm finished. I can't do this anymore.” He flung a small datapad on the ground and wheeled about to leave. “You have my resignation.”

As the blast door, which had shut behind him when he entered, began to open, Beta walked toward him, ignoring the datapad. “Admiral, you can't give up on us now. We need you.”

“What you have done here today is inexcusable. What you cost us, what you cost all of us, can't be replaced, and can't be justified. Not with data charts, not with cost-benefit analyses.”

The door opened and he stepped through, his pace noticeably slackened, his shoulders slumping more heavily.

Beta followed after. “I am here to make the hard decisions, Admiral. If the Reavers had been allowed to secure their foothold in Vahaba, then―”

“My rank isn't just for show!” he shouted in animalistic fury. “You know as well as I that they can hit any world in the sector just as well from a thousand lightyears away as from fifty.”

“The Reaver adaptation present at Vahaba was unlike anything we've ever seen before.”

“You didn't know that when you ordered the assault,” he bit back, trying to quicken his pace again.

“It was a defense, Admiral. Before you got there, before anyone else arrived, I risked everything we had to save the survivors of the Vahaba Colonies. Don't you ever forget that.”

“So now you're the martyr, eh?”

Beta reached out and grabbed the Admiral's shoulder. “It was eating the asteroids, raw material into finished goods. It was building infrastructure.”

Blakeley tried to jerk free of the droid's grasp, punching its arm with his free hand when he couldn't get loose. He nearly doubled over with a scream of pain: something may have broken.

“It was modeling itself after Guardian,” Beta continued, but released the admiral. “I had to stop them. I had to make us make a stand. This is war, Admiral.”

“That was slaughter. The slaughter of our own. We didn't sign up for this. No one signed up for that abomination you unleashed!”

“It had to be done.”

The admiral stormed away, the resolve in his step having quite returned. “Look at their faces!” he yelled without turning back. “Look at the faces of the tens of thousands of young men and women who you killed with Avenger. Look at the victims you murdered through what you decided had to be done. You're not a man, Smarts. You have no idea what death means.”

Blakeley climbed the ramp of his shuttle, and waited until it began to close to turn around. “Look at their faces, and tell me you were justified.”

* * *

The droid, Gamma, felt more than a little out of place, addressing the almost-exclusively human representatives of the Compact Fleet's constituent forces. “Information is still being gathered and processed, but as far as the Cooperative's research and theories indicate, we believe this event may have been substantial enough to force a sort of mass-conversion within the Reavers' guiding principles, collective consciousness, overmind . . . whichever term or phrase you prefer. What form that conversion will take, what consequences it will bring about, remain uncertain at this time. At present we can only hope that we have bought time, time to coordinate a larger offensive, time to exploit what weaknesses we know of the Reavers and bring them finally and ultimately to their knees.

“As for the fallout from this engagement: sensor records confirm that almost eighty percent of the ships present at Vahaba were sighted previously at Cooperative engagements in which at least one Guardian-enabled craft was partially compromised by Reaver infection. The manner in which this Reaver force had organized itself and the flaws inherent in its design suggest an imperfect attempt to emulate the hierarchy of the Guardian Defense System. As for the particularly virulent effects of this strain of the Reaver virus, including its ability to assimilate raw materials; our working theory is that this particular cluster of Reavers have accessed some level of Imperium nanotechnology. Whether they somehow incorporated that technology into their strain of the virus, or it is present in all Reavers and they have gained a more comprehensive control over its potential, remains uncertain at this time.

“Our primary concern, once this information came to light in the midst of the battle, was the escape and spread of these two very unique, very dangerous Reaver adaptations. Our focus was on what we labeled the Reavers' command constructs, the massive assemblages of derelict craft and scavenged materials which had somehow been converted into sorts of mobile space stations. As the source of the nanite plumes which infested the system itself, and the organizing centers for the Reavers in-system, it was clear that they were of paramount importance to the Reavers. But the escape of several smaller vessels from the battle does leave open the possibility that those adaptations have survived. Indeed, it is possible that the current levels of relative inactivity from the Reavers is resultant from a collective effort on their part to disseminate these adaptations throughout their numbers. At present, we cannot be certain.

“The Battle of Vahaba may be remembered by generations to come as the turning point in our struggle against the Reavers. It may also be the day that we damned the galaxy.

“Only time will tell.”

* * *

“I don't like it; I don't like it one bit.”

Amiral Panacka felt much more at ease now that he was back in his home province and far away from the Reaver infection of the Vahaba System. He felt somewhat less at ease at the thought that one message from a glorified battle droid might turn his entire fleet into bloodthirsty, self-guiding death machines.

Ruuvan scratched lightly at his fish-whiskers, trying his best to look engaged. “Look, Panacka, our guys have been over the code and the hardware a half dozen times now. This “Avenger Initiative” isn't in there, not anywhere. And besides, those Cooperative fellas did you a solid, coughing up that tech free of charge. That must have been a big deal for them, handing over the keys to their entire defense strategy on faith. They gave us access to the thing that makes their military tick; that shows some trust.”

Panacka shook his head bitterly. “You weren't there, Ruuvan. You didn't see it. Ships splayed out across the battlefield, Star Destroyers with holes punched straight through them, their guns still firing, evacuation orders refused because what if that one turbolaser emplacement was just what we needed to score the killing blow? The Dragons had more decency, and all their soldiers were wind-up toys.”

“Look, all I'm saying is we're on track to getting the East back in shape, and the Cooperative's had a lot to do with that. Now, suddenly we've got combat-ready ships, and dependable crews, and if it comes to a fight, a real fight where our way of life lives or dies by one choice in a thousand, you'll feel a hell of a lot safer knowing its not some green recruit pushing that deciding button. Face it: the way the Dragon War left us, Guardian's better-tested and higher-rated than most of our regulars now. And the best part? If you've got to take this fleet to war, into a real war with real casualties for our side, you're not going to come back with the blood of tens of thousands of bright-eyed kids on your conscience, because they're still going to be at the Academy learning how to be real soldiers, because Guardian's filling the gap now.

“Is it ideal? Hell no. Ships are made to be controlled; they've got no business thinking for themselves. But boys have no business fighting men's wars, and I'll take the former to stop from having to see the latter any day of the week, any age of this rotten galaxy.”

Panacka thought it over for a minute, but really he just wanted a chance to go to sleep. “Yeah, and on the bright side, at least I didn't let 'em plug the damn thing up to the whole fleet. Vlyx's got the interface, but we're still running her with a full and proper crew, and about half the fleet's free of the thing until this trial run's over and we make a final decision. Gods, I just hope I haven't already dug this hole too deep to get out of if the time comes.”

* * *

A figure moved through the darkened corridors of the Imperial Citadel, the mountain-city which serviced the administration of the Drackmarian Empire. It pulled its cowl close as it stepped between the shadows, its posture hunched, its pace hurried. Everywhere it turned, it met with the Imperial Honor Guard, and as it weaved its way through the intricate passages of the ancient complex, each group it encountered fell into step behind.

Rounding one particular corner in a hurry, the being's heavy robes parted slightly, and the gleam of a shaft of metal flashed for an instant before it was lost again in the folds.

Finally, the imposing doors of the Royal Court loomed ahead, and the creature boldly cast its hooded cloak aside.

For thousands of years, the Empire of Drackmar had not been whole. Its fate was balanced between two figures, two relics of a dead age . . . all that remained of Drackmar the August Lord. The one held claim to power by right of birth, the other held the same through appointment as proxy.

The power of Drackmar had too long remained splintered and opposed.

Today, the Reign of Drackmar would return.



As the doors opened, before his personal guard became aware of the situation, Emperor Draconis signaled them to stay their weapons.

The Avatar of Drackmar marched down the Obsidian Path, the sheathed Blade of Drackmar held in the grasp of its living hand. The Honor Guard fanned out around it, standing back as the Avatar itself approached the Obsidian Throne.

It looked up into the consuming Eyes of Drackmar, but the Emperor spoke before it had the chance.

“We all must do as our conviction requires. I know why you are here, and I have never doubted you before, Avatar. Do what you must, and quickly.”



With its droid arm, the Avatar of Drackmar drew the blade which had freed its people and lunged at the Obsidian Throne.

But the blow never struck home. Gripping the exposed blade with its free hand, the Avatar allowed its attack to fall short, landing on one knee and striking the blade, flat, against its thigh. It snapped cleanly in two, and the Avatar of Drackmar bowed its head low, raising both arms over its head. The hilt of the sword pivoted in its grasp, its broken blade pointing toward the ground. In its other hand, the broken tip of the sword was pointed down as well, the blood of the Avatar's slashed hand running down the blade and dripping from its point, a pool of blood gathering before the Obsidian Throne.

“Hail Drackmar the August, Lord Forever of this Chosen Realm. We are his humble servants, Children of the Way, and we submit to his will of Justice and Might.”

The Avatar raised its head slowly, reverently, to fix its eyes once more upon its Emperor. “Lord Drackmar, command us once more.”

The Being who sat upon the throne answered after a moment of deathly silence. “I decree the Age of the Warlords to have returned to my Realm. My children, arm yourselves.”

And so it came to pass that Draconis the Restorer perished from the worlds, and Drackmar the Lord of War was once more born into the galaxy.

* * *

The broadcast was being transmitted to the entire Coalition through appropriate government channels, free to be relayed and utilized by the various news and information networks throughout the galaxy.

The time had come. He had gone too far to turn back now.

The blue-white avatar of Smarts, Overseer of the United Cooperative of Peoples, spoke with a solemn depth that had never before been heard from him.

He tried, tried to be bold and unbent. Tried to be inspiring and optimistic. Tried to be . . . anything else. But he could think of only one thing. One thing that haunted his mind. One thing that refused to leave him be.

“They are haunting me, the faces of the soldiers I killed. The consequences of the actions I took. They stare out at me from the emptiness. From the void of knowledge. They're just faces now, just records stored in data, just images saved on chips. I killed them; they're empty now.

“I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that I . . . that I was something more. That I could make you something more. I thought I understood, in a way that you could never hope to. I thought it was my duty to protect you from your ignorance, to be your Guardian, your guide.

“I thought I knew better.

“But I am empty. Just a droid, just a . . . a made-thing. This power I have, that you have given me, I can't have it. I don't deserve it! It's not for me; it's only yours!

“I can't allow you to let me do this anymore. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I did it . . . wrong.”

There was a long silence, several seconds in which the glowing avatar remained completely still. Some may have thought there was some kind of transmission error, especially given the strained state of the HoloNet. But eventually the avatar spoke again, and when it did, its words were measured and impersonal.

“I, Smarts, a recognized sapient being, citizen of the United Cooperative of Peoples, do hereby formally resign from all public office and surrender all official authorities to conduct business on behalf of the government of that Cooperative. As such, my authorities as Overseer will revert to the relevant Councils of the Cooperative Senate; and the position, title, and power of Supreme Commander of the Cooperative Armed Forces will automatically fall to the most senior active command officer of the Cooperative military, Admiral Jonathan Blakeley.

"I am now and forevermore to be considered a private citizen of the Cooperative.

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”