With a soundwave that rumbled through the city, the resonator entered the docking port and made planetfall. Sliding down into the prepared structures, it shed its descender harness, the living metal falling to ribbons of shining sapphire before disintegrating completely. At the moment its base made contact with the surface of the world, the blackstone shifted state. Where before it had merely been black, an absolute darkness that reflected no light, now it glowed with an anti-light. It seemed to become a hole in reality, though in truth it was the opposite of a gateway; it had become a barrier. Aligned to the astromantic axis of the planet, the resonator reconfigured itself, facets and plates shifting in complex cosmometric patterns to distort the null-field projected into the star system from other nearby resonators. Like a rudimentary navigation device finding a magnetic pole, the resonator adjusted through multidimensional realities to assume a nodal form, both receiving and broadcasting the overnull signal.

An emerald aura encapsulated the towering needle, bathing the ruins and lines of metallic warriors in its green hue. Rings of pulsing energy ascended the tapering structure, accelerating as they reached the tip to become a blazing storm that leapt jaggedly into the heavens.

The resonator seemed to be operating properly on the physical plane. On the psychic front, Ah-hotep had to trust to the expertise of Szarekh’s dimensioneers. Like all of the necrons, her soul had been severed from her physical incarnation during the biotransfer process. She literally felt nothing as the physical world and the neversea were shorn from each other by the intrusion of the overnull. The humans, the few of them remaining, would know it, though. In the last vestiges of their soul they would feel the coldness descending, the spark of animus that gave them sentience drifting away to nothing.

‘Another world falls to the glory of the Szarekh dynasty!’ declared Simut, raising up his battleblade as if he had personally conquered the world.

There was little glory, in truth. Corralling or killing lower beings rendered thoughtless by the overnull barely constituted a war. Not that Ah-hotep cared. Conquerors and kings could define their own achievements, as long as there was a plentiful supply of energy on which to feast afterwards.

While the legion started translocating back to orbit, ready to move on to the next star system to be folded into the overnull, Ah-hotep drifted towards the heart of the citadel, where her senses told her a thermic reactor was still operational. All other considerations fell away – the politics of the dynasty, the great cosmic plan of the Silent King and her own loyalties and ambitions were as nothing when weighed against the desire of finally being able to feed.

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR