From the center of the galaxy to its very edges, let fear of the Brotherhood reign.
Such was the message that the Mawsworn intended to send with their strike upon Nirauan. With the Galactic Alliance left reeling as Coruscant itself burned, the vicious marauders and power-hungry Dark Side savants of the Brotherhood had now turned their gaze on the vast cities of their other main foe: the New Imperial Order. If they could do the same here as they had done in the middle of the Core Worlds, breaking the defenses of their foes and raining down fire on their terrified citizens, they would declare their unrivaled power. They would show that nowhere and no one in the galaxy was safe from the depredations of the Maw.
It was a vital part of their grand strategy to bring the governments of Known Space to their knees, for they could do so only by keeping their foes (and they had many, many foes) on the defensive. Although the Brotherhood had managed to weather the first wave of attacks on their steadily-growing domain, they remained at a significant disadvantage to well-established great powers such as the Alliance and NIO. With their limited number of worlds and less developed infrastructure, they could not possibly match the industrial capacity of their rivals. They could win only by staying on the offensive, surviving off of the spoils of war.
Taskmaster Tu'eggacha, slavemaster of the Brotherhood, understood this all too well. The Hidden Maw was a vast engine forged for a single purpose: to burn Known Space to the ground, shattering every government and toppling every king. It had no trade network, no civilian economy, nothing to sustain itself through lean times beyond violently consuming what others had produced. If the Brotherhood were to succeed in its mission, casting down every other galactic power, it would surely turn and devour itself in a last scramble for whatever worthwhile scraps remained of the galaxy. Victory would be the horde's undoing.
Of course, most everyone among the Mawites believed that they would somehow avoid this seemingly inevitable fate. The marauders and heathen priests believed that the final destruction of all unbelievers would bring about a new age, with their dark gods the Three Avatars ushering them into paradise. The Neo-Imperials of the Final Dawn believed that they could forge a new Galactic Empire out of the ashes the marauders left behind, bringing rigid order to a galaxy they had cleansed by wielding chaos. Darth Solipsis and his New Sith Order plotted in the shadows, scheming toward ends even Tu'teggacha could not guess at.
For his part, the Taskmaster simply did not care. All he wanted was to spread suffering.
Seated in his command throne aboard the battle-scarred
Fatalis, the iconic flagship of the Mawite fleet, the Ebruchi watched as Nirauan's system fleet fell back before the overwhelming might of the Brotherhood. He had brought to Nirauan much the same assembly of starships that he had used to ravage Coruscant, a battle group he had christened Strike Force Gehinnom in honor of the lost Holy City. It was a powerful fleet, and it would not be alone. The Regent of the Final Dawn,
Derix Tirall
, would be bringing a fleet of his own, one even more full of advanced technological terrors than the one Tu'teggacha now deployed.
They would need that strength, for the power of the NIO fleet was legendary.
Sure enough, it did not take long for the Crusader Fleet to arrive... and it was a sight to behold. Where Tu'teggacha's force was a blunt instrument, designed to engage head-on and brute force its way through any obstacle, the Crusader Fleet was more varied, with twice as many different ship designs as the Mawites could boast. This was a multitool pitted against the Taskmaster's power sledge, and the NIO fleet's crews were well-versed in the tactics and discipline that would bring them to full effectiveness. These were veterans of the Third Imperial Civil War, the breakers of the Sith Empire itself. Why should mere barbarians scare them?
The Taskmaster, of course, intended to show them
exactly why.
As the system fleet fell back under the Crusader Fleet's covering fire, the first shots of the
true battle rippling across the shields of both sides, Tu'teggacha addressed his battle group.
"By the will of the Avatars," he began, his voice booming out across every vessel in the fleet,
"we strike at the heart of the enemy. The gods are watching. Let no warrior show fear! The Dark Three will judge us by the blood we spill, and those who die with hands dripping crimson shall be lifted up to the Galaxy To Come. Slaughter the unbelievers! Create for this decadent planet a great ring from their shattered hulls! War! Death! Rebirth!"
The chant echoed all across the fleet.
"War! Death! Rebirth!"
There was no doubt that the Mawite battle group would be champing at the bit after that, ready to kill and be martyred in the name of the Avatars. The NIO, it seemed, was no less eager. Already one of their largest ships was moving to engage, approaching like a champion and his entourage walking ahead of the main army to parlay... or to duel. The Taskmaster's glassy black eyes fixed themselves on the vast bulk of the
Antares Draco, along with its formidable escorts. If they wished to come forward in a powerful but measured push, testing his defenses while keeping an even stronger punch in reserve, he would gladly test their mettle.
Let them run the gauntlet he would lay for them, and see if they proved worthy.
Years ago, when the Taskmaster had been nothing but a wretched, despised runt among his pirate clan, they had devised a cruel game to torment him. They had lined up along the sides of the galley, in two long, parallel lines. At the far end from where he stood, so skinny his bones showed through his rubbery flesh, they had piled high a plate of delicious-smelling food. "Run, accursed one," they had taunted him. "Run and take the food!" And he ran for it, ravenous, starving. But each Ebruchi in line threw something at him - a plate, a mug, a
knife. He could dodge them at first, or shake off the hits, but by the time he reached the middle...
The repeated blows took their toll on him, and he always went down, still starving.
He had learned well from that dark memory. One did not have to break one's enemies with a single blow; instead, one could steal their strength gradually, bleeding it away as they tried to reach their goal.
"Move the frigates into gauntlet positions!" the Taskmaster ordered. The
Samael-class frigates, the smallest and nimblest of his mostly-large craft, fanned out in a long V shape. They danced at the edge of the range of the oncoming
Draco and her escorts... and they opened fire. The
Samaels were not killers on their own, but softeners, like champing teeth mashing food to be swallowed. Each boasted
twenty ion cannons.
Blue ion fire streaked across space, seeking to chip away the shields of the
Draco and her escorts, and to drag down their subsystems. Screened by a cloud of expendable
Darkshear swarm fighters, they could hold their ground against small-scale attacks. Any attempt by the NIO ships to bring the battle to them would only cause them to scatter and fall back, with the frigates on the
other side moving in to continue the harassment. They were being deployed as skirmishers, dangerous irritants who would make the NIO attack brittle by the time it reached the range of the big Mawite ships. And when it did, when the orbital autocannons locked on...
The Taskmaster intended to shatter his foes like glass.
Darth Solipsis
The Mongrel
Kyrel Ren
Aemilio Valaar
Zachariel Steelblood
Djorn Bline
Willan Tal
