Crushing the Rebellion

No one would imagine that an object weighing less than two tons could destroy a warship, much less a fleet. Daluoke had a battleship. Even in the vast Imperial military, that was a formidable vessel: eight kilometers from bow to stern, weighing billions of tons. Building a ship like that demanded astronomical resources and knowledge of the highest order.

Even the multipurpose warships that formed the Imperium's ubiquitous mainstay, like the Shadow Moon, stretched for kilometers and carried void shields and gun arrays. A light cruiser was an enormous object in its own right. All the Water Droplets together weighed a negligible fraction of one. Who could believe they could destroy an entire fleet? Anyone suggesting it would be dismissed as insane.

The ships that had captured the Water Droplets glowed red, like paper lanterns whose candles had set the paper alight. Their reactors were exploding, creating that illusion from outside.

The fleet commander immediately ordered systems checks, fearing that the explosions had been triggered by a virus. Such tactics were common in void warfare. Small sensors could deliver electronic viruses into enemy vessels and cripple them. The checks found nothing wrong with Daluoke's systems.

The fleet's monitoring systems had detected anomalies involving the Water Droplets. Briefly, they appeared on the auspex, then vanished beneath other information. The cogitators did not consider a few flying fragments a serious problem.

No one imagined anything so small could destroy a warship. Among the flickering binary calculations, the event occupied barely half a line, on the verge of being discarded as useless code. Even the meticulous Tech-Priests missed its significance. They carefully read the binary records while overlooking the tiny things that would doom them.

The Water Droplets had easily destroyed their captors. In seconds, they had torn the ships apart and wrecked their core reactors. Once in space, they reached the first cosmic velocity within a few seconds: eight kilometers per second. At that speed, their potential energy was terrifying. No ship could withstand them.

Human eyes could no longer track them. Only if they emitted light and were far enough away might they be observed. In ten seconds, they crossed more than a hundred kilometers, still accelerating. By the time they struck another warship and sped toward further targets, they had reached the second cosmic velocity, traveling at more than eleven kilometers per second. Terrible speed brought terrible potential energy.

Void shields consumed vast amounts of power. Daluoke's ships had theirs at minimum strength, enough to stop only relatively weak laser fire. Aboard the ship under attack, urgent alarms sounded. The consoles reported hull damage and temperatures still climbing.

The crew found a perfectly circular hole near the stern, bored straight through the ship. Molten iron dripped from its edges. That section of the hull glowed red-hot, its temperature high enough to trigger the alarms. No one knew what had caused it. Warships were built from strong, heat-resistant materials. Their hulls were incredibly hard.

Normally, only deep-space torpedoes weighing several tons could break through the void shields and damage that heavy armor. Before the crew could report what they had found, more urgent alarms sounded. Something else had broken through the shield and struck the ship.

One object was heading for the bridge. The gun arrays opened fire, but hit nothing. Their many small automatic rapid-fire guns laid down a dense, devastating barrage. There should have been no way through it. Still, not a shot found its target.

Panic spread. What was attacking them? They did not have long to suffer. A Water Droplet punched through the hull and crossed the control room. Its terrible speed produced crushing pressure, stripped away the air, and brought searing heat. Everyone in the compartment burst apart, then vaporized.

After destroying the second ship, the Water Droplets reached the third cosmic velocity, averaging seventeen kilometers per second. They were so small and fast that even sensors struggled to track them. Daluoke's commander could only watch his ships die one after another. He still did not know who was attacking him. The Imperial vessels remained outside the system, showing no sign of having fired.

"Who is our enemy? What is happening?" he shouted wildly. No one could answer.

Overloaded systems sounded shrill alarms, choked with data. Every technician was combing the records, trying to identify their enemy. No one noticed the code they had discarded.

On Daluoke, people watched the brilliant fireworks overhead in terror. More than ten nuclear fireballs burned in the sky. In the radiance of those blazing little suns, the fleet seemed to catch fire, becoming a sea of light. Melting ships burst apart one after another. Waves of incandescent metal spread through space, like ripples from boulders thrown into an ocean of lava. The people below were terrified.

The commanders of the pacification fleet were stunned as well. Over long careers, they had studied countless strategies and tactics for void warfare and considered every kind of extreme battlefield situation. Watching an entire fleet destroyed in ten-odd minutes was still more than they could bear. The Water Droplets were terrifying.

Some Daluoke vessels reacted quickly. They increased reactor output, trying to raise their void shields to full strength. Void shields were the Imperium's standard ship defenses, absorbing interstellar radiation and resisting meteor impacts and enemy fire. Warships usually carried several layers, their protection increasing with power input. Daluoke's vessels had not been running them at maximum strength. The energy cost was enormous, so captains rarely did. In their own starport, the ships had left them at their lowest setting.

Now they tried to increase output and stop the mysterious attackers. Before their reactors could ramp up, the Water Droplets pierced them. By now, they were moving at sixty kilometers per second. Even activated void shields were breached almost instantly.

The battle lasted twenty minutes in all. Daluoke's fleet became a graveyard in space. Its commander was another drifting corpse. Yide and the others said nothing. They watched the distant destruction as ship after ship disappeared from the holographic display. Every vanishing vessel meant death.

Humanity had spent more than ten thousand years studying void warfare. It had fought countless enemies. Vast warships had carried it across the stars, driving back those who dared attack it. Humans had faced fortress-ships the size of small cities and battle satellites as large as moons. They had even encountered mad species that turned entire worlds into war machines. Yet they had never imagined war could look like this. So efficient. So merciless.

Despair spread across Daluoke. Its people had never dreamed their vast fleet could be destroyed so easily. Kaliguisi watched the points of light disappear one by one and fell silent. Terrified voices came over the starport's channels. It, too, was under attack. Soon those voices stopped. The starport was gone. The world's artificial satellites followed, losing contact with the surface one after another.

As the huge Imperial fleet approached Daluoke's outer orbit, panic and disorder spread below. Even the nobles and Knight houses that had joined the High King's rebellion were terrified. Their fleet had been destroyed in twenty minutes without ever seeing its attacker. The speed was appalling. Through sheer power, the Imperium had made its anger plain to the whole world.

The Imperium had always treated rebel worlds with extreme brutality. Everyone was afraid. They had thought the Great Rift had shattered it. The astropathic messages spoke of countless worlds crying out in agony. Interplanetary communications had collapsed. Worlds dependent on trade and outside supplies had fallen into darkness, panic, and riots.

They had assumed that even if the Imperium attacked, it could spare only a small force. Instead, before its fleet entered the system, everything Daluoke had in space was gone: spacecraft, satellites, orbital weapons platforms, and mines. The vast fleet overhead filled the population with oppressive dread.

The High King refused to give up. He ordered the Knight houses to deploy their finest warriors and hold the fortresses. The Imperial warships had reached outer orbit, but no attack followed. The mass airborne assault Kaliguisi expected never came. This was not mercy. Yide had orders to test new equipment for the research institutes.

Even after reaching outer orbit, he continued to hold his attack.

Aboard a huge transport, assault squads from the Catachan 22nd Infantry Regiment were putting on their combat armor. It combined designs from the angels' database in the Supergod civilization with Stellaris technology. Each cutting-edge suit carried a miniature reactor, a neural interface linked to its wearer's brain, a high-energy beam cannon, and enhanced vision systems. The soldiers could control their armor with ease, gaining powerful weapons and protection.

A round socket had been drilled into the back of each soldier's skull. As they donned the new armor, its interface connected and activated the suit. It could not match a Primaris Space Marine's power armor, but it was far better than their old flak armor. Every suit also had a full air-recycling system and flight capability.

Yide did not intend to use drop pods. His soldiers would jump straight from space toward Daluoke and take the enemy by surprise. Nearly ten thousand Catachans stepped into their open suits. The armor closed and locked around them. To the chanting of Tech-Priests and the slow flow of fluid through hydraulic lines, module after module chimed to confirm activation.

Once they were equipped, Yide opened their channel. "Kill every noble. Take no prisoners. Do not plunder the civilian population. Your task is to destroy Daluoke's ruling class as quickly as possible."

"Remember who you are, soldiers. You are fighting men, not bandits. No massacre of civilians will be tolerated. By the Emperor's glory, we shall meet again beneath the Throne."

As he finished, every helmet announced that its armor was fully active. Ordinary soldiers were about to wage war against a Knight world. On the surface, Knights already strode among Daluoke's fortresses in their towering war machines. Vast numbers of soldiers had been mobilized, ready to die defending the High King's honor.