The fourth ampule was a highly unofficial tactical assessment. It summarized the current situation and gave me some idea of what all had happened since I went into the crypt. Things were bad. The Empire had already collapsed back to two-thirds the size it was when I was last active. The Coeleopterans were openly laying siege to the Seven Golden Cities. Exo-solar agitators were believed to be responsible, but no proof ever managed to get entered into the system. Nearly half the Nobles were on the verge of open revolt. Neptune had been shifted into an unstable orbit that would have brought it down on Earth like a hammer, if it hadn't broken apart less than half-way there. Now there was ice and debris, and lots of dust all along the arc of its doomed trajectory, with a lot of it falling into the gravitational clutches of the star that was once Jupiter. Turns out it's not much of a star, really. It's expected to fizzle-out in another few hundred years. But they've been wrong before. So have I. It's a rude awakening to wake up to find your entire solar system is in the middle of a hot war between the Great Powers of the Outermost Dark. These new enemies who break planets like eggs and scramble them up? They're Shoggoths. Not the old, degenerate idiot-things that were used as the basis of our hyper-adaptive armor systems. These are the real thing. The ones who left Earth several millennia ago. No one knows why they're returning. Maybe my mission to Beta Cygnus III will provide some insight. they've designated it
Operation Brain Trust.
