There was definitely no question of using the "proper" method. Lord Death Despoil had far more demands on his time than just the Azure Skies, and three months was too much. (The renoucing of the power would not even have been a moment's hesitation, of course. Anything that demanded a loss of information was never, ever worth any kind of power.)

Instead, the Lichemaster - still in a null-magic field and turning his attention mostly back to those matters which did not need magical attention (of which there were many - redeployed to the KPS Division station around Nestrotar, where the curse-smasher operations were being prepared.

*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

Captain Whisperbleed shook her head, looking over the data on the Auzre Skies' FTL. "I'm not sure whether to be impressed or laugh."

Ensign Krelliac looked up from what their screen. "Ma'am?" they ventured curiously.

"They accelerate on sublight - must be magical compenstation for the time dialation - and just... ram through what they hit. I can't decide if I'm impressed that they can withstand those sort of impacts or laugh that they're so bad they actually unintentionally HIT something in SPACE."

Krelliac, shook their head, still keeping an eyeglow on the hlem, though they were completely stationary. "If they can tank FTL collisions, they must be using the smae sort of relativitic compensation as our railguns... Go faster, but not actually hit anything like infinite energy. Even so, they can't be hitting anything big or..."

"Or the same thing would happen as if we hit a full-velocity railgun at a planet." Starship weapons generally had to be eased DOWN from full power when hitting the surface; while actually blowing a planet up ws one thing, the amount of baleful energy required to deal devastation on a global level was considerably less. A railgun sluh hitting the atmosphere could deal incredible devastation... By the fact it would basically atomise with the heat. "Unless they reduce their effective mass enormously, but that doesn't gel with their make-it-so-we're-falling gravity..."

"And thus we're left with they must be hitting glancing blows on something and bouncing off with the shields... But it's still sort of impressive they are so bad at navigation they are hitting things."

Krelliac was quiet for a moment, and Whisperbleed could also see the thoughtful glow of the little wight's eyeglows.

"Maybe they have to. Maybe, since they have to use a G-Well to get most of their maneouvre, right, so maybe they have to point directly at a G-Well they [i]can't[/i] see very well and practically run into it by default. They might even be navigating by divination alone, and you know how dubious that can be."

"Huh," Whisperbleed nodded to herself. "Yeah, you could be right. Still, it will be interesting to see how they react to a railgun slug."

"Speaking of..." She said. She was looking at the main command display. Essentially, it was a large hologram table, projecting a 3D view. To the eye of the uninitated, it looked like a giant computer game. All the ships appeared to be relatively close together, all with little lines and other data appended to them. But this was no graphics, but real-time images of the outside. All the vessels and points of interested were dynamically scaled, vastly exaggerating their proportional size to the empty void so as to be clearly seen. This was quite possible, given the huge distances in space. The normal combat seperation of an Aotrs fleet squadron was around 70 to 80 thousand kilometers. At that size, even the giant Star Swampers would be all but invisible to the naked eye or eyeglow. Magnified by three orders of magnitude or so, the spacing naturally gravitated to one that resembled models on a table or in a game. When vessels actually DID get relativisticlly close to each other, the display automatically proportionally scaled them, tinting the readouts slightly, red-shifting the desingation/name bars the closer they got. 

Likewise, this game-like UI was not entirely a co-cidence, since it was realised by the time the Aotrs had FTL, that fictional gaming had already worked out the best ways to deliver the same sort of information for so many decades prior. 

Now, the solar system view showed the arrival of the 4th Fleet - or at least a notable fraction of it. The the six-mile super-cruiser [i]Doomskrieg[/i] [i]Treek-kaa[/i] was prominently absent, for it would have dwarfed all the other vessels, even with the proportional scaling. But a very sizable task force, a hundred and fifty ships, including the Crypt Bearers Troop Transports and the other ancillery vessels. They emerged as a group 35 AU out, in the fringes of the ice-asteroid belt* around the extremities of the solar system.

There, most of the fleet would stay, with the actual combat force making Gate jumps closer in. (A wise commander understood you never used more than around a third of your forces in actual combat, since the other would be resting or repairing.)

For the moment, the fleet held position, assessing what the Azure Skies vessels were doing.

*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

Unlucky cheerfully answered Boldness' questions (or at least the commonly known broad explanations). Boldness seemed taken aback when he explained that they had no "knights," at least not in the sense she probably meant (the pre-industrial forces, granted, had - and still did, when required - mounted soldiers in full plate, but chivalry and the like had never been even on the table back in the day for the Aotrs.) 

Computers didn't explode because the Aotrs considered trading away a practical tool to be blinded to be idiotic. (Unlucky's bias' might have been showing, just a little.) As Unlucky pointed out, they lived in an extremely dangerous universe, and reliance on heavily magical effects or even exotic technologies left you tremendously vulnerable as and when someone developed the counter. There was, ultimately, a certain elegance in the comparitively mundane (since, he explained by analogy, a vibrosword turned off was still a vibrosword)... At least until the point sheer technological enhancement contained so many checks and balances. Which, the Aotrs were painfully aware, was not a place they were quite in yet. But even so, today's [i]Fireball [/i]was not the same spell as he used when he first learned. The science of magic had refined it and optimised it, so that it used less mana and scaled better and contained not a few inherent dispel-resistances. What could be acheived by a digital spell-caster, capable of running complex calculations through a computer brain, could achieve a level of complexity that not even Lord Death Despoil could master. But such casters were extremely rare and the Aotrs had none on the strength level of the High Command to be able to leverage that ability very usefully. 

"Even Shardan and Lazerblasters don't seem have many casters strong enough to do that and they SCARY enough with technology."

Unlucky went on to explain the Aotrs were not beholden to any goddesses and were, in fact entirely secular. They had fought gods, had a few demigods beholden to the power and even fewer divine casters of gods from outside it, but they did not have any of their own. And, he added, they'd managed really quite nicely without them. So, there was no Crimson Goddess, not in the manner he expected she meant, but if she would clarify...

As to when the went back to killing the Furnace Knight...

"We not get to this stage without being careful and deliberate. First encounter caught us off guard. That not happen all that often, but it make us even more careful. We will get back to killing him, but Aotrs have learned that best practise... Only ever pick fight you can win.

And, with proper preparations, we intend to win this one..."



*["Ice Asteroid Belt" being the Aotrs terminology for "Kuiper belt." 35 AU is a little bit inside the average orbit of Pluto, so well outside the orbits of the four planets which are in the habitable zone.]