The aide’s stubby little tentacles, reflected Commander of Shoals, had never been used in combat, had never been used to slash an enemy’s belly open, or to tear away that same enemy’s fins. These were the soft appendages of a civilian, with no place on board this world-sized warship.

They were deep within the ruins of a star system whose population had numbered in the billions until it had been destroyed, more than a year before, by the Emissaries. This was the first time the General had returned here since that awful day. He and the forces he commanded had done their utmost to prevent that particular tragedy, but the Emissary ships had continued to fill the skies, intent on carrying out surgical strikes against the defensive installations on all the system’s worlds – while one single enemy drone had found its way past their coreships and dived into the living heart of the system’s star.

The Shoal’s forces had rescued pitifully few in those last frantic hours before the star detonated. Even if there had been enough coreships to carry away every last one of the system’s inhabitants, the basic logistics of such a mission would have rendered their efforts almost pointless. It would have taken the better part of a year to transport all of them safely away from the various planetary bodies.

Instead, they had a scant few hours to save what and whom they could.

And therein lay the terrible tragedy of the nova war: those left behind had no choice but to wait for the end as the departing coreships jumped to safety. It was a scenario that had been repeated in so many other systems that he could not even bring himself to contemplate their number.

They had now returned to retrieve certain items of value from the wreck of a coreship partially destroyed by that nova, but had themselves been ambushed by a cloud of Emissary scouts hidden within the tangled smoke of the newborn nebula. A godkiller had unexpectedly appeared, drawn there by the scouts, jumping to a point less than a light-minute distant and then quickly vectoring inwards to deliver the final death-blow.

Commander of Shoals stared at the data coming in from his ship’s external sensor arrays. What it told him was utterly preposterous. And yet, despite this, more data was pouring in from other sources, all appearing to support the most unlikely conclusion: that the scouts had somehow, inexplicably, self-destructed.

There had also been an enormous explosion on board the god-killer. Adrift and aflame, it now spun out of control through the nebula.

Fresh data-glyphs kept appearing in the murky water filling the chamber, carrying high-priority reports from far-flung sectors of the galaxy – indeed, from the very farthest corners of the beleaguered Hegemony. Huge swathes of the Emissary fleets were reported to be spontaneously self-destructing.