AN: Space Racists be doing a Racism.
With every coming year, more and more ships begin roaring out of the yards of the Federation, crews trained in painstaking courses and maneuvers that buckled right at the edge of the nation's ability to train new blood, only for the ceiling to be lifted and then approached immediately once more.
Weapon after weapon joins crates of munitions and containers of supplies, and tens of thousands of tons of materials are shifted daily from warehouses to ships in orbit, from where they are raced to their next journey in the vast interconnected net of interstellar logistics. Soldiers march into the bellies of stellar beasts by the millions as reinforcements and by the billions as new armies as claw and tail alike.
A generation is born and has grown up knowing only a time when their homes are bent toward war production and the need to strike against Evil Incarnate, to rise with a weapon in hand against that which would see all destroyed and ruined in the name of foul beings and fouler ideas.
New psychic skills are unlocked, Songs Sung, and then taught to the Choirs already on the front, with another Sub-Sector consecrated in Sacred Sands and their patterns that deny the powers of Choas all who dwell in their protective embraces.
And as the Flag Armada Quasar ventures forth with its attendant fleets against the Symphosium, as it slowly turns a grinding stalemate into a grinding advance where successes are bought by the blood of too many good people, Flag Armada Pulsar is dispatched toward the front against the Cult of the Gore-Sworn Duelists...only to be redirected from Sub-Sector Verdant Dawn to Sub-Sector Melrìtrùm, panicked shouts by the Choirs sent there warning of an imminent attack as the Sect of the Festering Maggot recently opened a front to the Sub-Sector with blinding speed so unlike their usual modus operandi, with ships that seem more organic than machinery, even for them.
The ships of the Maggot arrive in their lonesomes.
They arrive in their trios.
They come in the dozens.
They swarm in their hundreds.
By the end of the year, over seven-thousand Maggot Ships have crashed into, and some through, the desperate defenses arrayed against them by the Duchy, the Federation...and the Confederacy, as the Duelists seem to have struck an alliance with the Maggot against the forces of sanity assailing them.
And through that year, the Choirs, Prognosticors, and Scouts of the Duchy, Federation, and Confederacy do everything within their power to discover the sudden and near overwhelming flood of new ships from the Sect of the Fecund Maggot. For every fifty ships that are obliterated by the watchful eyes of the defenders of these nations, one manages to slip through...to horrific effects. The Confederacy quickly and painfully learns how to set up effective quarantine zones...and when to apply the flamer instead of the healer's touch, as the Choirs of the Federation are too busy within the orbits of planets and on the fronts applying the Song of Cease to let the already-blooming and rot-flowering remains of the Maggot Ships decay into nothingness before the next wave arrives, lest they are strengthened by the already-present fecundity of death. The Federation finds that its plans to upgrade the fleets of the Ascendancy have to be shelved for now, as every ship is required to hunt and put down those ships skirting around the edges of its defenses to strike at more opportune targets in the Sub-Sectors currently in the chaos of switching bureaucracies. The Duchy...trades lives for time. Time for ships. And ships for lives.
Until, at last!, a scout of the Federation manages to break through into the belly of the beast, slipping into sight of Festerspire itself...and its crew beholds heresy.
Titanic beasts of chitin and flesh are chained to vast pumps and gantries, flies and workers swarm around these behemoths so thick they are but a liquid within the void, and from the bellies of these disease-ridden abominations of flailing tentacles and open maws...ships are cut free.
Ships swiftly adorned with armor and weaponry bolted onto their frames and then sent off toward war and death.
The Choir that witnessed these abominations reported their findings and attempted to incinerate their own souls just to escape the horrific truthlie they glimpsed within their guts.
And it is after that confirmation, when the numbers of the ships seem to rise without end, and the Duchy and Federation enter talks to create a Task Fleet capable of punching through Maggot lines and end these things...that the Webway Gate in End of Line in the Archwan Sub-Sector...activates.
And a ship emerges.
A ship beyond proportion, beyond reason, beyond beauty.
A vessel to which even a Battlecolony could dock into internal hangars like Thules do in Virgos, and from which several similarly-sized vessels do emerge...and a communication.
"This is Princess El'aliar, of the Craftworld Lyl'eltharum. Be joyful, Mon'keighs, for your betters have deigned themselves to ensure that your inadequacies and failures in acting as a protective embrace for Rianoen and Tonesh Suith shall not be their end. Bring me the master of your fleets so I may enlighten them in their failures before we set out against these "Maggots" you struggle against."
...WAT?
(6-Hour Moratorium)
[] (Write-In the Grand Admiral of the Star Navy.)
