Humanity Endures

Part 8 - Preparations | Chapter 7

Lassarha's armor weighed on her, this was true, but the great boredom, unease, and, to a smaller extent, terror that she was experiencing weighed on her more; as time slowly passed, she began to feel more and more like she was attending a far more stressful meeting of the Senate. Her strategic headquarters aboard the Ineffable was starting to lose its appeal. Atop a gilded chair, surrounded by people on gilded chairs, which were affixed to a tiered circle full of bickering, disagreeable, yet powerful idiots, and with this circle being built around a central speaking area and display, this headquarters and the Senate were hauntingly similar — besides their vastly different sizes.

With the only people keeping her company being the quartet of Wraiths that shadowed her imperatorial self at all times — these Wraiths were terrible company, for they were both invisible and utterly silent — Lassarha may well have begun to despair then, if she hadn't fallen into the clutches of desperation long ago. The gathering was almost identical to a Senate meeting in all but one critical respect — the outcome of the meeting had unimaginable consequences for the rest of the galaxy, and for her. It had unimaginable consequences, and Lassarha's room of brilliant military advisors couldn't agree on how to phrase things, let alone how to act on them, all while her very life and imperatorship depended on the strategy devised there and then.

The chamber was filled with tension and no small measure of distress; and not all of this distress came from Lassarha. Her people were not this way without reason: eyeing the depths of the Remnant, some of the support vessels that had accompanied her fleet tracked millions of objects that, despite the immense interference of the Remnant, had been identified as traitorous warships on their way to Nahmatiix. The lack of civilian traffic in the wake of humanity's twin wars made this detection easier, of course, with the only civilian movement being refugee convoys, or military defectors seeking refuge from at least one of humanity's wars in the space controlled by the Neutral League — a force that was doubtless watching the opening moves of the upcoming battle with great anticipation. This thought only brought up yet another unpleasant realization: as much as Lassarha despised the idea, she would doubtless have to grant a complete pardon to those worlds, politicians, and soldiers that had defected from her side to the Neutral league; she could hardly imprison soldiers who had just wanted to fight the alien scourge, and she could not take any steps against these neutral planets without igniting a second civil war, as much as it pained her to be so egregiously merciful to defectors. The only way humanity would survive was through pragmatism, and forgiving all those who had stood idle and watched while she fought was hardly the highest price that she would have to pay for a unified Empire. Of course, all of this relied on her winning the battle of Nahmatiix in the first place, and that was seeming more unlikely by the moment.

Those Traitor fleets that had been detected, worryingly, were all converging on the same destination that Lassarha's armada was approaching — Nahmatiix. When considering the number of them that her armada had identified since it had left Tehkria, there could be no doubt that whatever force lay in wait at Nahmatiix was already multiple tens of millions of warships strong — the product of half of the galaxy furiously mobilizing to fight the other half. Lassarha found the entire scenario rather poetic, though the fact that her forces were significantly outnumbered already, even by conservative estimates, did much to dampen her enthusiasm.

This disparity in numbers was pronounced, even as Heralax controlled less of the galaxy than his Tehkrian counterpart: in the name of his great cause, Heralax, unlike Lassarha, was stripping some of his worlds of their fleets entirely, leaving them completely open to alien attack though at the same time making his own capital almost impenetrable. Not only this, but, according to intelligence reports, much of Heralax's fleet was comprised of converted civilian ships that had been hastily converted to the task of warfare, and then manned by reservists and untrained volunteers — they couldn't hope to fight against the superior Loyalist ships individually, though swarms of them could do so easily. Heralax had these swarms of ships at his disposal, and even though many of them were nuke-fodder at best, it only made a bad situation worse for the Loyalist imperator.