The world in Nemesis' jaws is not a no-name chunk of flesh ripped from the throat of an alien civilization.
It is a world of the Restoration Crusade.
At the end of the Age of Knights, after the fall of the High King, a powerful clan shattered their own webgates and sealed themselves off from the galaxy. For a thousand years, during the rise and fall of the Atlas Cultural Sphere and the Imperium that followed it, they built their own civilization. A continuation of the old virtues of chivalry, paired with the traumatic reaction to being on the receiving end of an apocalyptic total war. For generations they advanced their technology, militarized their society, and sought every atom of potential that existed within steel and chivalry. Their blades were honed against lesser alien civilizations but their goal was always this: to prove that ordinary men and women, fused with technology, hardened by experience and lifted by virtue, could defeat the horrors of Biomancy on their own terms.
A mountain range falls like a velvet curtain; behind it, a formation of Knights. Not the gold and ivory marvels of bygone age, these are boxy, grey and industrial, everything lovely cut away and sacrificed on the altar of More. The massive reactor-mech screeches and glows, engine creating a fourth sunrise. Magnets flicker and fade and blades the size of houses scythe into the Wolves.
A crushing flank maneuver follows. Treads scream, tanks smash through forests, turrets already turned to target enemies in a predetermined kill zone. Just before the hammer falls, the dagger slices - airframes cut through the sky, trailing ribbons of fire that cut through the earth and transform the soil into poisoned knives. Infantry with jetpacks race behind, weaving through every gap, investigating every bush and crevasse for hidden soldiers. Assisted by machine intelligence, lifetimes of practice and discipline, and the most profoundly meritocratic culture ever devised, the maneuver is perfect. There are no gaps, no failures of co-ordination, no hesitation or morale shock. Warriors drilled from the moment they could walk take the field, a crushing fist of metal driven directly into the chest of their most hated foe. Thousands of bloody doves emerge from fields of corpses.
"Look," said the Shogun with a smile, "at what they must do to imitate a mere fraction of our power."
And it is true. No Ceronian trains so. There is no need to, any more than a woman must train her stomach to digest what it is fed. The calculation of war does not happen in the minds of officers, nobody has ever needed to explain to a Ceronian how to react to an artillery barrage, the Shogun for all that she is their leader has never needed to give a single order throughout her reign. The Ceronian penchant for art in battle does not in any way represent a lackadasical approach, instead the depth of military understanding is so deep that there is room for playful flair. The mechanics of action can be taken for granted, all that's left is the meta-war of reading the minds and souls of their enemies.
And this war is not fought alone.
Some have thought the Ceronians are a hive mind, a single distributed entity carried across trails of phereomancy. That was not Doctor Ceron's design. Instead they are an entire ecosystem; specialists emerging to fill every possible combat and social role, flexible enough even in the moment to adapt to new opportunities. The pack keeps some outcast, bullied and predated upon, to ensure that there are stealth hunters and intellectual outsiders. And yet, when the circumstance of war aligns with their privately developed specialty, they wordlessly seize complete control over battlefield command. Proud alphas lower their ears, lie flat and unquestioningly obey the instincts of the girl who knows how to play dead.
This was Doctor Ceron's genius: to divorce war from desire. This is the perfection that prevents Aphrodite from devouring his lover. Though later there will be time for desire, for pride and humiliation to make itself fully known, for positions to be reasserted or overthrown, as long as Mars stands upon the field the wolves fight without ego or pride. And for all the grey paint and small unit tactics of the Crusade, that flicker of pride that still burns in their hearts is what the wolves exploit time after time after time...
*
Even the Shogun is not immune to knowing her Place. When the War needs her to pick up a rifle and join a solid projectile fusillade she does so without thinking. When she must detour to place an anti-Knight mine on a deserted stretch of road deep in the backlines it is not the sort of thing that she's even consciously aware of happening. Sometimes she passes by mass formations of Ceronians without so much as a blink of the eye, all of them instinctively knowing that the War does not permit them the space for a leadership contest at this moment. The skyline burns, macrocannons pouring fire into orbital plates, the howls of wolves jamming every frequency.
But then a shield bursts. A city collapses, pulverized under its own amplified weight as gravitational pulses fixate on it. Immediately every Ceronian's internal calculus changes - and that is when the heavy weapons emplacements swing around from guarding the road to fire on the Shogun and her companions.
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