BooksBarbecue
Back Excession
Chapters (108)
  1. About the Author
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. 1 - Outside Context Problem
  6. I
  7. II
  8. III
  9. IV
  10. V
  11. VI
  12. 2 - Not Invented Here
  13. I
  14. II
  15. III
  16. 3 - Uninvited Guests
  17. I
  18. II
  19. III
  20. IV
  21. 4 - Dependency Principle
  22. I
  23. II
  24. III
  25. IV
  26. V
  27. 5 - Kiss The Blade
  28. I
  29. II
  30. III
  31. IV
  32. V
  33. VI
  34. 6 - Pittance
  35. I
  36. II
  37. III
  38. IV
  39. V
  40. VI
  41. 7 - Tier
  42. I
  43. II
  44. III
  45. IV
  46. 8 - Killing Time
  47. I
  48. II
  49. III
  50. IV
  51. V
  52. VI
  53. VII
  54. VIII
  55. 9 - Unacceptable Behaviour
  56. I
  57. II
  58. III
  59. IV
  60. V
  61. VI
  62. VII
  63. VIII
  64. IX
  65. X
  66. XI
  67. XII
  68. XIII
  69. XIV
  70. 10 - Heavy Messing
  71. I
  72. II
  73. III
  74. IV
  75. V
  76. VI
  77. VII
  78. VIII
  79. IX
  80. X
  81. XI
  82. XII
  83. XIII
  84. XIV
  85. XV
  86. 11 - Regarding Gravious
  87. I
  88. II
  89. III
  90. IV
  91. V
  92. VI
  93. VII
  94. VIII
  95. IX
  96. X
  97. XI
  98. XII
  99. XIII
  100. XIV
  101. 12 - Faring Well
  102. I
  103. II
  104. III
  105. IV
  106. V
  107. VI
  108. Epilogue

It wasn’t the sort of enlargement the Fate Amenable To Change had witnessed and seemingly been transported by; that had been something based on the skein or on some novel formulation of fields. This was something incarnated in the ultimate fire of the energy grid itself, spilling across the whole sweep of Infraspace and Ultraspace and invading the skein as well, creating an immense spherical wave-front of grid-fire boiling across three-dimensional space.

It was expanding, quickly. Impossibly quickly; sky-fillingly, explosively quickly; almost too quickly to measure, certainly too quickly for its true shape and form to be gauged. So quickly that there could only be minutes before the Sleeper Service ran into it and far too quickly for the GSV to brake or turn and avoid the conflagration.

Suddenly the avatar was on its own; the Sleeper briefly severed all connection with it while it concentrated on dispersing its own war fleet all about it.

Some of the ships were Displaced from deep inside its interior, snapping out of existence from within the thousands of evacuated bays where they had been quietly manufactured over the decades and reappearing in hyperspace, powered up and already heading outwards. Others - the vast majority - were revealed as the giant ship peeled back some of the outer layers of its field structures to reveal the craft it had hidden there over the past few weeks, loosing entire fleets of smaller ships like seeds disseminating from a colossal pod.

When the avatar was reconnected to the GSV, most of the ships had been distributed, scattered to the hypervolume in a series of explosive flurries; bombardments of ships, layers and blossoms of vessels like a whole deployed hierarchy of cluster munitions, every warhead a warcraft. A cloud of vessels; a wall of ships rushing towards the blooming hypersphere of the Excession.

V

V

The Grey Area watched it all happen, carried in its cradle of fields by the three silent warships. Part of it wanted to whoop and cry hurrah, seeing this detonation of matériel, sufficient to smash a war machine ten times - a hundred times - the size of the approaching Affronter fleet; ah the things you could do if you had the time and patience and no treaties to adhere to or agreements to uphold!

Another part of it watched with horror as the Excession swelled, obliterating the view ahead, rampaging out like an explosion still greater than that of ships the Sleeper Service had just produced. It was like the energy grid itself had been turned inside out, as though the most massive black hole in the universe had suddenly turned white and bloated into some big-bang eruption of fury between the universes; a forest-levelling storm capable of devouring the Sleeper Service and all its ships as though it were a tree and they mere leaves.