Forevermore Unto the Void

The Andromeda War (part 1: Famine)

           "To the last I grapple with thee; from Hell's heart, I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my                                                     last breath at thee"-Herman Melville

1

8 Minutes to Midnight (~52,855 AFR)

Archimedes' hologramme sat across from the Seraphim leader, a figure unremarkable among his own kind, the same insectoid body and wings grafted into a perversely, uncannily human form, Archimedes himself aboard his flagship, still the Kyrie Inferni in orbit, as the Argusi sentinels began to land en masse on the outskirts of the last system belonging to the Seraphim.

"Beax-Khan," Archimedes began, "we offered you peace before, yet you would not take it. Argus have bade me extend this final olive branch to you before I send the Ubermensch to rip apart your last system planet by planet. Surrender now and your past transgressions will be forgotten-you will be granted, after a brief adjustment period, full citizenship in the Argus Collective. Will you accept my offer or shall I do to you what I've done to all who have stood in my way?"

There was a moment of delay while the translation programme turned Archimedes' words into the clicking and utterly inhuman speech of the Seraphim. The Seraphim leader thought for a moment about Archimedes' offer, mandibles clicking as it considered the implications of accepting this peace.

"I do not accept your offer of peace, Director," the Seraphim Khan replied.

"Very well," Archimedes nodded gravely. "Then I will butcher your entire race to a drone."

Archimedes dropped the connection, causing his hologramme to blink from existence in the Khan's throne room, and walked from the platform, slowly donning his power armour and beginning to order the assault on the Seraphim home system.

Archimedes had spared no expense to wipe the enemy from existence; the entire Argus fleet arrived en masse at the system's border, warping in from finishing dozens of different campaigns, changed midway through by Archimedes' conference and the subsequent use of the 'suffer not the alien' doctrine. All weapons restrictions were lifted save for those on Project Ultus, and only then because Archimedes didn't wish to waste the energy it would take to fire the weapon on something so inconsequential.

Shortly after the Argus ships had arrived in system, they were greeted by a token resistance force made up of the last of the Seraphim ships, graceful, delicate things that seemed more art than combat system-until they began firing. Despite their appearance, the Seraphim ships could produce a terrifying amount of fire; under the right circumstances, the ships could make mincemeat of even some battleships. These were not those circumstances.

Archimedes never gave them the chance to fire, ordering the commanders of the ships to tear the vessels apart with Feynman Lances, an improvement on the old Tachyon Spears that, using focused antimatter fired a miniaturised Alcubierre Cannon, designed to rip matter apart where it stood, and Aetherite Cannons, railguns designed to fire a quasicrystalline form of energy harnessed from the Other Realms. In seconds, the hostile ships simply stopped existing, their frames ripped to shreds under a weight of fire great enough rip planets apart.

Leaving the wrecks of the few ships the Seraphim had left to burn silently in the void around the outermost world, Archimedes ordered his fleet to split up into escort formations around the vessels equipped with Neutronium torpedoes-to guard them while they shelled the planets below with the deadly warheads. World after world cracked under the force unleashed by the terrifying weapons, the energy unleashed by the expanding Neutronium more than great enough to overwhelm the energy binding the worlds together, quickly reducing planets home to billions of the creatures into molten rock drifting off into space to join the asteroid field around the system. The only planet spared the fate of bombardment was the homeworld of the Seraphim, and that world suffered a far worse fate than mere bombardment.