Conquest: Warpmancer Book Nine by Nicholas Woode-Smith

Author:Nicholas Woode-Smith [Woode-Smith, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Warpmancer Press
Published: 2019-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

“Humanity had become lazy. Apathetic. It was perfectly willing to let its soldiers die light years away, treating war like a game. But when war comes to the homefront, as it did at Ganymede, laziness isn’t allowed. War is a forge, and it made us into steel.” – Lenda Smitt, Collin’s World Archivist

Chapter 10. Melancholy

The Empire of Xank was fading.

One by one, every hard-won star, every ancient colony and new domain attained after the fall of blessed Resh, turned black. On the starmap, first, and then in the shrinking of supply lines. The body-budget dwindled. No more feathery peons to fill the ranks. No more worm-feed to sustain the loyalists.

The Xank Empire was not so much burning, than merely shrinking away…until it would be no more. Krag-Zurktag, the first and last Avenger, had witnessed the death of an empire before. The Empire of Resh. The united front of a warlike people. Not even united could the areq defeat the Imperial Council. They were hunted to near extinction. Their great tracts of space, now derisively called the Outer Reaches, fell into ruin. Species they had created, forgot about them. All because they had stood up to Imperia.

But every sin deserved punishment.

Now, the Avenger and the Xank were paying for their crimes and for their incompetence.

La’rz shouldn’t have been lost. It was the most important cog in the body-budget. A hatchery, mutation and training world. The invasion of the Resh’s home system rested on its productive capabilities. And now it lay in the hands of that…that…bird.

It all began after the fall of Zona Nox. Resh’s first colony world. The place where the Reshian Empire had been developing its main weapon against the Imperial Council. It had been called Daikur-kra, back then. And it had been much more habitable. Alas, after the blighting of Resh, warp-storms infused Zona Nox’s mountains with twisted energy, disabling technology and obscuring the mind. But that couldn’t stop the Xank. And neither could the new human inhabitants. There had been one goal: Secure Daikur-kra, now Zona Nox. Finish the Vortex. Finish the war. And this time, win it.

Resh was lost. The Avenger had no delusions that he would ever see its lush green fields again. Even if he was, his people were effectively extinct. Only the immortals survived, and they were sterile. And that was only the ones who remained alive and loyal. Krag-Zolith was recently dead. Krag-Zot had run off with the traitor Word Lector. The Avenger expected such a betrayal from the human Word Lector, Smith, but not from one of his oldest comrades. Krag-Zot’s betrayal truly stung the Avenger. But that was the least of his concerns at present.

After the Imperials blighted Zona Nox, the Vortex was out of their grasp once again. Some may have thought that the cessation of attacks by the Xank was because of military defeat. That the hordes needed refilling. But that wasn’t it.

The Xank had halted because there was no point going on. The Vortex, the only possible way

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