Chapter 256: 256
If audio player doesn't work, press Stop then Play button again
One of the interesting features of Terran Descent Humanity is their apparent weakness. A cursory inspection of any inter-species relationship with the Terrans will show that the species that encounters them, without fail, always draws the wrong conclusions. Even those who study the history of Humanity often draws the wrong conclusion due to something that the Humans call 'confirmation bias' or, in more layman's terms, 'I prefer my own facts' when examining humanity.
The reason for this is galactic evolution. The Great Filters create what Terrans call 'one trick ponies' to get past the Great Filters. With only Humanity as the exception, every race who has achieved faster than light travel and managed to settle more than a dozen systems follow the same historical and cultural patterns. Cooperation, conformity, and what the Humans sneeringly refer to as 'the Greater Good.'
Yes, yes, I see you students who's races subscribe the Greater Good theory chafing back there. Calm yourself. There are factions of Humanity who subscribe to the Greater Good theories, but Humanity as a whole does not. Too often in Human history the Greater Good has led to mass extinction, slaughter, and, ultimately, war, as what one group of Humanity perceives as 'The Greater Good' is seen by another group as 'Totally without redeeming qualities inhumane horror' and those groups eventually clash.
That is not to say Humanity is perfect and the pinnacle of Galactic races. They are just as capable of cruelty, spitefulness, and pettiness as any other race.
They just do it well.
When it comes to temporal manipulation the Terrans avoided the Great Temporal Filter by realizing, quite early when their work was still in the theoretical phases, that any change to the time stream inevitably resulted in the worst possible result for the manipulator. Eventually, before the first temporal lens was created to look back into the past and to aid in exiting superluminal travel modes, they discovered that, mathematically, the universe dislikes anyone meddling in the 4th Dimension as that is one of the primary overarching bedrocks upon which even the Big Bang rests.
The Terrans proved, with math and equations, that the more you mess with the time stream, the more the universe seeks to ensure that you end up with the worst possible outcome, and further attempts to change it will result in even more less than optimal outcomes. With science and reason they proved that the act of observing a particle changes its state. Temporal mechanics means that the state of particles are changed by the act of observing them once they have been observed, changing them even further, which causes what the Humans determined to be 'sub-quantum paradox events' which, inevitably, lead to the worst conclusion possible.
With that, let us discuss the Khatri Temporal Skirmishes. Turn or scroll your textbooks to page 328 and prepare your note taking devices.
Pre-Glassing Terra suffered from multiple genocidal purges of millions or even hundreds of millions of people. The most famous and indelibly marked in the Terran psyche was the Khatri Provincial Realignment, in which over nine hundred million Humans were killed in a methodical industrial genocide in the course of two years. Temporal researchers attempted to stop the rise of the Cult of the Iron Cow by traveling back in time, resulting in...
--Excerpt From: Non-Conventional Warfare: Failures and Dangers, East Point Military Academy, Hamburger Kingdom, Xenospecies Academy Annex, Third Year Required Instruction for All Cadets
---------------------
Mukstet rolled, taking the missile hit on the compressed graviton belly band, then righted, feathered the port engine so the craft slewed to the right without changing momentum angle, and cut loose with his 25mm cannons. The heavy rounds hammered into the infantry that had managed to crawl from a downed dropship, twisted and warped flesh exploding as the rounds passed through the target to hit the ground and explode. He kicked the port engine back into full power, ignoring the screaming shudder of the overstressed drive, and swung back in line with his forward momentum.
He was in the zone.
He dropped down, his wingmates with him, until the graviton eddies under his craft tore up dirt, mud, grass, and debris, spraying it behind him in a rooster tail, his forward guns clearing the path of any enemy, his door gunners hammering Pontiac Vindicator hatred into the enemy as he passed.
Some psionic-enhanced rounds punched through his forward battlescreen and his wavering psychic shielding, slamming into the armaglass of the cockpit, shattering it into the pilot's seat even as the last energy of the rounds exploded memory-foam from the seat itself.
"973, rotate out the psychic shielding emitters, change the wavelength algorithm, they're getting through," he said, his voice calm even though death had missed him by hitting the wrong seat.
--roger roger gravity pump online-- 973 sent back, turning and hurrying away from the port side graviton engine. He squeezed into the maintenance space even as the craft buzzed and hummed and vibrated around him. The psychic shielding had to be done manually to prevent outside forces from rotating the emitters.
PSYCHIC PSYCHIC PSYCHIC appeared in Mukstet's vision as he pulled back the stick, coming around in a looping twisting turn that sent him on a strafing run at a ninety-degree angle from his previous attack.
"973?" he started to say.
His mouth filled with the taste of electric blueberries and sizzling hamburger grease, his teeth all itched and tickled below the gum-line.
The Terrans in the back stopped firing for a long second.
"You guys all right back there?" Mukstet asked.
Another second passed.
"Yeah, yeah, we're fine," Sergeant Arora said, his voice perfectly level and calm. "Engaging targets, prioritizing light mechanized and infantry."
Mukstet frowned. Sixty seconds ago both Terrans had been yelling as they fired the guns. The loss of Terran emotional controls had been a problem for the last two months, a problem that everyone had gotten used to.
"Engaging targets," Sergeant Khwaja said, his voice perfectly calm. "Prioritizing light mechanized and infantry units."
He put it out of his mind as he saw a massive Precursor vessel hit the ground, the side doors dropping down. He thumbed the rocker switch and the missile pods under each of the striker's stubby wings chuffed out a pair of missiles, his neural link already having determined targets. The missile's warbois howled with insane glee as they surged forward, grav-drives kicking in, and they spun up the small coil of madness and rage within their warheads.
Only one of the missiles hit, coming in low then arcing up to detonate just over the clamshell doors. A loud THRUMMMMmmm went off even as a purplish halo erupted from the white spike of the missile that touched the ground and reached meters into the sky.
Hundreds of creatures were revealed, many of them convulsing, firing weapons unwillingly as their synapses misfired, more than a few of the blue-lit globes suddenly splashed with ravaged neural tissue and going dark as the contained brains detonated.
The rest of Foxtrot-Niner Wing Bravo's psychic munition rockets hit and exploded, the point defense systems shattered and the linkages burning with stray psychic impulses even as the warboi howled with glee having jumped from the missile and into the phased radar array buffer of the massive dropship.
The munitions didn't hurt the ground, but the Precursor's warsteel machines, forged in great psychic foundries, ignited and began to melt, the living tissue, both Hesstlan and other was scorched, flayed, and rent.
"Come around, give it to them again," Mukstet growled.
"Engaging," one of the Terrans said, his voice almost flat and monotone.
Mukstet didn't have time to worry about that as he swung the around and arced up, rolling his striker so the Immelmann Turn ended with him diving back down to the deck as his wingmates went through their twisting reversals.
ATOMIC ATOMIC ATOMIC Mukstet was warned, his HUD telling him the burst would be three miles up and straight into the face of a city-sized craft. His systems let him know he'd be able to handle the EMP pulse, his craft's shielding rated in the megawatts, but he still glanced to make sure the mechanical systems were primed.
"STAMPY HELP!"
Stampy fired straight up, quivering with glee, as the 80mm Hellbore round sliced through the Precursor landing force's lighter craft even though a half-dozen tried to interpose themselves between Stampy's shot and the massive Precursor vessel that had necessary fab units and reinforcements.
And a four member battle-squad.
Aboard the ship the group, referred to as a squad, saw the oncoming nuclear round, the compressed and directed nuclear blast wrapped in a howling storm of electrons arranged into attack programs somehow and brought up their psychic shielding.
On the ground was absolute anarchy and howling fury. The Conclave had reached back in time to gentle the new Mantid servitor caste, but that didn't seem to have worked, which was impossible. The Conclave were masters of time and space, the Mantid servitors, labels Species Twenty-Three, should be incapable on an intellectual and emotional level of engaging in violence after thousands of years of cooperation to achieve space flight.
Instead, there was something else.
The Squad yanked their attention from the carnage below as Stampy's shot raced upwards. They pushed more psychic power into the shielding, sneering at the pathetic nuclear shots from the ground.
That was the moment an asshole in orbit, trained by his mother to run the mass driver cannon, spotted the Precursor dropship, figured 'why not', and fired a 250mm round the size of a telephone pole rather than empty out the chamber since he was in the middle of switching ammunition types. He fired it, didn't bother to run targeting, just fired it by eye, then swung his systems around to bring his targeting computers to bear on the massive ship that had tried to hide behind Hesstla's moon.
The Squad realized that they were about to be hit by two rounds, either one they could handle, but both at the same time was too much, and reached down to the ground with their powers.
They blinked out of existence from the ship, feeling the burning scrape of Hellspace touch them as they reappeared on the ground.
Ralvex blinked as his autocannon hit something on the ground between the end of his barrel and the quartet of heavy Precursor tanks. He reflexively dialed up the cyclic rate from 250 as the rounds hit, exploded, and kept hitting something that flared purple.
A Terran infantry gunner to Ralvex's right saw the explosions out of the corner of his eyes, turned, and joined his fire to Ralvex's.
"Priority targets, follow my tracers, all available crew served weapons in Quadrant Nine," the Terran said.
Ralvex noted his voice was cold, remote, missing the rage and uncontrolled emotions of the last two months, but not the same disassociated professionalism of when he had been trained. As if the killing and howling battle around him was nothing to be concerned about, just something to be dealt with.
It was something else, something that made the fur on his spine stand up.
His retinal link kept warning him of a red-level psychic threat that had the top bar in purple, maxed out, and 525 had his psychic screens cranked so far up that his eye sockets tingled and he could taste and smell strawberries even though he'd never tasted them before.
The Squad devoted more of their mental energies into strengthening their combined personal shielding as another heavy weapon, then another, and still another joined the first in pounding at their psychically generated shielding. The rounds were warsteel jacketed, forged in rage and fury, and the Squad felt cold logical outrage that another race would dare use their own weaponry against them and infuse it with such primal and primitive emotions instead of the cold logic of their own warsteel.
They, as one, split their minds, creating another consciousness within their own minds that could be absorbed later but right now was needed to keep the shielding up as yet another heavy weapon joined in firing on them.
They reached out with carefully honed and trained senses, feeling the temporal stream, and attempted to reach back, to rewind the battle to restore all of their forces while leaving the enemy ragged and harried from the ongoing fight, only to find the temporal stream was being threaded, metered, somehow protected from any influence except for the natural flow of the 4th Dimension.
They recoiled from something that should not be. They, the Squad, were the masters of the 4th Dimension, only they possessed the will and knowledge to not only sense it, but understand and manipulate it.
But the evidence was undeniable. There were multiple devices maintaining the temporal stream.
Worse, there were thousands of temporally locked sources on the planet. A part of their brains were devoted to nothing more than temporal perception, an entire region of their prefrontal cortex. Worse, there was a second region of their brains that could alter their perception of time, and a third that tracked with fine detail time.
The Squad reeled back from the coldly burning fire of those minds, that at each touch gave a kneejerk autonomic response of DON'T TOUCH ME! that was roared back along attempted psychic linkages.
One of the four being Squad noted that every time they touched one of those minds, those minds that the Conclave had altered to their pre-spaceflight states in brain function and tissue structure, all had a cold burning fury that seemed to know they had been touched. That being reached out and touched one.
DON'T TOUCH ME! roared back from Staff Sergeant's Zundui's subconscious and into his conscious brain and he glanced quickly to the side, where he'd felt the cold slimy touch on his mind come from.
There were four of the purple creatures, clad in iridescent robes, using focused psychic energy to keep back the hammering guns of no less than six crew served weapons.
SSG Zundui smashed a biomechanical beetle with a crysteel globe for a head out of his way, then kicked it onto its back before dumping a burst from his heavy magac battle rifle into the suddenly revealed underbelly. Purple goo and chunks of flesh showered him as he turned, his visor's static charge snapping and cleaning the goo from his visor. He shifted his hand, adjusted his aim for the three hundred meter shot, and thumbed the firing stud.
The Squad kept up the psychic energy needed to maintain the shielding as yet another weapon joined in lashing at their shield. Wasteful amounts of antimatter, warsteel, burning chemicals, enhanced phosphorus, and massive kintetic energy kept them from being able to shift any energy to attack. They combined their will, reached down into their reserves, and pushed outward, forcing their shielding almost a meter away so the ever-encroaching blasts were no longer happening a feeding tentacle from their faces.
The 40mm grenade dropped down out of the sky, in between the four, and hit the ground.
Inside the psychic shields filled with bouncing fragments of battlesteel stretched into a wire, wound around the explosive charge, and cut with notches. Thermite enhanced white phosphorous joined, bouncing around with the shrapnel until it found a home in purple flesh.
All four of the Squad screamed across the psychic wavelengths, the agony made them drop the shields.
And six 20mm autocannons obliterated them from the face of the planet.
Admiral Thennis stared at the planet below, the planet she had been defending for decades, back and forth, forwards and backwards, reliving the same battle over and over without her ships or her men restored as the enemy was, without the ships and men refreshed as time had wound back.
She could see, even from orbit, the flashes of atomic weapons. The glowing nimbus around the BOLOs as they went to war with every bit of their firepower against an enemy who was landing in strength for the three hundredth time.
Admiral Thennis pulled her attention away from the display of the planet, watching as the great black ships joined the fight. She glanced down at the communications display next to her worn and tattered crash couch.
BISMARCK> Coming to two-niner-two by sixteen reference to stellar plane. Firing main battery three.
GLOIRE> All carriers launch mayflies, ginsu and thunderpunch combinations. TF MIDWAY, concentrate guns on enemy carriers. Wahoo, go to silent running, get behind the enemy. TF NORTH SEA, move to engage the enemy's heavy warships. TF OVERLORD, prepare your Marines for boarding actions.
HOOD> WE ARE THE DEFIANT ONES! THE UNDYING ONES! VICTORY OR DEATH!
YAMATO> EITHER IS FINE!
Thennis shook her head. The text went by so fast that it was difficult to keep up.
The Black Fleet. She'd heard of it. Everyone had. It was rumors and conjecture and most naval officers didn't really believe it actually existed.
Now it was here. Engaged in battle against the enemies of TerraSol. It's reality warping weapons belching out fire and rounds the size of cattle, their forms twisted and terrible, their Captains undying and bound to their ships by chains of blood and fury.
Thennis knew the legends.
It would not leave without adding a Captain to the deck of one of its undying warships.
She felt a chill and glanced at her son, the product of a torrid decades long affair with a shipboard Marine enlistedman, and feared, in the silence of her own soul, that the Black Fleet was there for her.
More text appeared and Thennis gave the order for Task Force Tiamat to break action and fall back, put some distance between themselves and the enemy.
On her screen the orders burned with a cold violet light.
GLOIRE> Bismarck, Marat, Missouri, move forward and allow Task Force Tiamat to break action to deslush, cool, and reload.
Bellona turned at stared at the ship that kept trying to hide in the shadows of other ships, in shadows of debris. She could sense the pulsing psychic tendrils from that ship linking the enemy fleet together, attempting to reach beyond the battle to elsewhere.
"Gloire, time to Hellspace arrival?" she asked, her voice clear and pure in the absolute vacuum of her command deck.
"First arrivals in eight minutes, Captain," the Gloire's Operating Mind informed her, the voice crisp and sure in the vacuum.
"Transmit to Task Force Tiamat we have incoming reinforcements. Inform planetside that they have relief coming," she ordered.
GLOIRE TO ADMIRAL THENNIS COMMANDING> Eight Minutes Until Reinforcements in Strength.
GLOIRE TO ALL PLANETSIDE ELEMENTS> Eight Minutes Until Reinforcements
The message flashed on Ralvex's visor as he lashed at the Precursor tank with his heavy cannon, blowing apart battlesteel treads and running gear.
"STAMPY HELP!" the robot squealed as the Battlefield Tactical Network informed him that there would be a five second gap where a main gun shot would not endanger any friendly forces or interrupt their attacks.
The 80mm Hellbore detonated on the second rank of tanks, the 125kt blast shattering battlesteel.
Mukstet's instruments sparked as the EMP washed over his striker. The fireball bloomed, reached toward him, then he was inside of it, his instruments seeking out the enemy vehicles that had survived, running off of power source detection only. He could feel the pull of the superheated air cooling and pulling back to form the mushroom cloud, feel the suction on his striker.
His two door gunners kept firing, the fireball kept at bay by the battlescreens even as it faded to a debris cloud.
Mukstet's striker whipped through the mushroom cloud, his three wingmates right behind him, going low against and banking to come around and strafe the other side of the battlefield.
------------
Punee was asleep on the floor, tired out from her attempts to walk. Her face was smeared with biter cookie and slobber mixed together, and her little feet kept kicking. Tru and Elu were reading their dataslates as Dambree watched.
She heard the rumble of the battle off in the distance and glanced at Mister Mewmew. Mister Mewmew didn't do anything more than keep showing the little 'zzzzz' on his face screen so Dambree took another drink of her fizzybrew and went back to reading.
She knew, someday, that those noises would stop.
Dambree glanced at the end table where she'd set the pistol then over at Nee to make sure they weren't entertaining one another. Satisfied her half-feral sister was still asleep, she went back to sipping on her fizzybrew and reading.
It was fascinating stuff that Mister Mewmew had gotten from whoever Mister Daisy was a few days ago when there had been earth trembles for nearly two hours.
-------------------
MANTID FREE WORLDS
Something feels weird.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
How so, sis?
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
MANTID FREE WORLDS
It's nothing I can put my fingers on, just something feels off.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
Yeah, same here. There's something weird going on.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TELKAN FORGE WORLDS
It felt like someone was touching my brain for a moment, but it went away.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TNVARU PEOPLE
I didn't feel anything.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
AKLTAK SOARING WORLDS
Me neither.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT
I didn't either.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
MANTID FREE WORLDS
Maybe it's nothing.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
Please report us if you find any errors so we can fix it asap!
One of the interesting features of Terran Descent Humanity is their apparent weakness. A cursory inspection of any inter-species relationship with the Terrans will show that the species that encounters them, without fail, always draws the wrong conclusions. Even those who study the history of Humanity often draws the wrong conclusion due to something that the Humans call 'confirmation bias' or, in more layman's terms, 'I prefer my own facts' when examining humanity.
The reason for this is galactic evolution. The Great Filters create what Terrans call 'one trick ponies' to get past the Great Filters. With only Humanity as the exception, every race who has achieved faster than light travel and managed to settle more than a dozen systems follow the same historical and cultural patterns. Cooperation, conformity, and what the Humans sneeringly refer to as 'the Greater Good.'
Yes, yes, I see you students who's races subscribe the Greater Good theory chafing back there. Calm yourself. There are factions of Humanity who subscribe to the Greater Good theories, but Humanity as a whole does not. Too often in Human history the Greater Good has led to mass extinction, slaughter, and, ultimately, war, as what one group of Humanity perceives as 'The Greater Good' is seen by another group as 'Totally without redeeming qualities inhumane horror' and those groups eventually clash.
That is not to say Humanity is perfect and the pinnacle of Galactic races. They are just as capable of cruelty, spitefulness, and pettiness as any other race.
They just do it well.
When it comes to temporal manipulation the Terrans avoided the Great Temporal Filter by realizing, quite early when their work was still in the theoretical phases, that any change to the time stream inevitably resulted in the worst possible result for the manipulator. Eventually, before the first temporal lens was created to look back into the past and to aid in exiting superluminal travel modes, they discovered that, mathematically, the universe dislikes anyone meddling in the 4th Dimension as that is one of the primary overarching bedrocks upon which even the Big Bang rests.
The Terrans proved, with math and equations, that the more you mess with the time stream, the more the universe seeks to ensure that you end up with the worst possible outcome, and further attempts to change it will result in even more less than optimal outcomes. With science and reason they proved that the act of observing a particle changes its state. Temporal mechanics means that the state of particles are changed by the act of observing them once they have been observed, changing them even further, which causes what the Humans determined to be 'sub-quantum paradox events' which, inevitably, lead to the worst conclusion possible.
With that, let us discuss the Khatri Temporal Skirmishes. Turn or scroll your textbooks to page 328 and prepare your note taking devices.
Pre-Glassing Terra suffered from multiple genocidal purges of millions or even hundreds of millions of people. The most famous and indelibly marked in the Terran psyche was the Khatri Provincial Realignment, in which over nine hundred million Humans were killed in a methodical industrial genocide in the course of two years. Temporal researchers attempted to stop the rise of the Cult of the Iron Cow by traveling back in time, resulting in...
--Excerpt From: Non-Conventional Warfare: Failures and Dangers, East Point Military Academy, Hamburger Kingdom, Xenospecies Academy Annex, Third Year Required Instruction for All Cadets
---------------------
Mukstet rolled, taking the missile hit on the compressed graviton belly band, then righted, feathered the port engine so the craft slewed to the right without changing momentum angle, and cut loose with his 25mm cannons. The heavy rounds hammered into the infantry that had managed to crawl from a downed dropship, twisted and warped flesh exploding as the rounds passed through the target to hit the ground and explode. He kicked the port engine back into full power, ignoring the screaming shudder of the overstressed drive, and swung back in line with his forward momentum.
He was in the zone.
He dropped down, his wingmates with him, until the graviton eddies under his craft tore up dirt, mud, grass, and debris, spraying it behind him in a rooster tail, his forward guns clearing the path of any enemy, his door gunners hammering Pontiac Vindicator hatred into the enemy as he passed.
Some psionic-enhanced rounds punched through his forward battlescreen and his wavering psychic shielding, slamming into the armaglass of the cockpit, shattering it into the pilot's seat even as the last energy of the rounds exploded memory-foam from the seat itself.
"973, rotate out the psychic shielding emitters, change the wavelength algorithm, they're getting through," he said, his voice calm even though death had missed him by hitting the wrong seat.
--roger roger gravity pump online-- 973 sent back, turning and hurrying away from the port side graviton engine. He squeezed into the maintenance space even as the craft buzzed and hummed and vibrated around him. The psychic shielding had to be done manually to prevent outside forces from rotating the emitters.
PSYCHIC PSYCHIC PSYCHIC appeared in Mukstet's vision as he pulled back the stick, coming around in a looping twisting turn that sent him on a strafing run at a ninety-degree angle from his previous attack.
"973?" he started to say.
His mouth filled with the taste of electric blueberries and sizzling hamburger grease, his teeth all itched and tickled below the gum-line.
The Terrans in the back stopped firing for a long second.
"You guys all right back there?" Mukstet asked.
Another second passed.
"Yeah, yeah, we're fine," Sergeant Arora said, his voice perfectly level and calm. "Engaging targets, prioritizing light mechanized and infantry."
Mukstet frowned. Sixty seconds ago both Terrans had been yelling as they fired the guns. The loss of Terran emotional controls had been a problem for the last two months, a problem that everyone had gotten used to.
"Engaging targets," Sergeant Khwaja said, his voice perfectly calm. "Prioritizing light mechanized and infantry units."
He put it out of his mind as he saw a massive Precursor vessel hit the ground, the side doors dropping down. He thumbed the rocker switch and the missile pods under each of the striker's stubby wings chuffed out a pair of missiles, his neural link already having determined targets. The missile's warbois howled with insane glee as they surged forward, grav-drives kicking in, and they spun up the small coil of madness and rage within their warheads.
Only one of the missiles hit, coming in low then arcing up to detonate just over the clamshell doors. A loud THRUMMMMmmm went off even as a purplish halo erupted from the white spike of the missile that touched the ground and reached meters into the sky.
Hundreds of creatures were revealed, many of them convulsing, firing weapons unwillingly as their synapses misfired, more than a few of the blue-lit globes suddenly splashed with ravaged neural tissue and going dark as the contained brains detonated.
The rest of Foxtrot-Niner Wing Bravo's psychic munition rockets hit and exploded, the point defense systems shattered and the linkages burning with stray psychic impulses even as the warboi howled with glee having jumped from the missile and into the phased radar array buffer of the massive dropship.
The munitions didn't hurt the ground, but the Precursor's warsteel machines, forged in great psychic foundries, ignited and began to melt, the living tissue, both Hesstlan and other was scorched, flayed, and rent.
"Come around, give it to them again," Mukstet growled.
"Engaging," one of the Terrans said, his voice almost flat and monotone.
Mukstet didn't have time to worry about that as he swung the around and arced up, rolling his striker so the Immelmann Turn ended with him diving back down to the deck as his wingmates went through their twisting reversals.
ATOMIC ATOMIC ATOMIC Mukstet was warned, his HUD telling him the burst would be three miles up and straight into the face of a city-sized craft. His systems let him know he'd be able to handle the EMP pulse, his craft's shielding rated in the megawatts, but he still glanced to make sure the mechanical systems were primed.
"STAMPY HELP!"
Stampy fired straight up, quivering with glee, as the 80mm Hellbore round sliced through the Precursor landing force's lighter craft even though a half-dozen tried to interpose themselves between Stampy's shot and the massive Precursor vessel that had necessary fab units and reinforcements.
And a four member battle-squad.
Aboard the ship the group, referred to as a squad, saw the oncoming nuclear round, the compressed and directed nuclear blast wrapped in a howling storm of electrons arranged into attack programs somehow and brought up their psychic shielding.
On the ground was absolute anarchy and howling fury. The Conclave had reached back in time to gentle the new Mantid servitor caste, but that didn't seem to have worked, which was impossible. The Conclave were masters of time and space, the Mantid servitors, labels Species Twenty-Three, should be incapable on an intellectual and emotional level of engaging in violence after thousands of years of cooperation to achieve space flight.
Instead, there was something else.
The Squad yanked their attention from the carnage below as Stampy's shot raced upwards. They pushed more psychic power into the shielding, sneering at the pathetic nuclear shots from the ground.
That was the moment an asshole in orbit, trained by his mother to run the mass driver cannon, spotted the Precursor dropship, figured 'why not', and fired a 250mm round the size of a telephone pole rather than empty out the chamber since he was in the middle of switching ammunition types. He fired it, didn't bother to run targeting, just fired it by eye, then swung his systems around to bring his targeting computers to bear on the massive ship that had tried to hide behind Hesstla's moon.
The Squad realized that they were about to be hit by two rounds, either one they could handle, but both at the same time was too much, and reached down to the ground with their powers.
They blinked out of existence from the ship, feeling the burning scrape of Hellspace touch them as they reappeared on the ground.
Ralvex blinked as his autocannon hit something on the ground between the end of his barrel and the quartet of heavy Precursor tanks. He reflexively dialed up the cyclic rate from 250 as the rounds hit, exploded, and kept hitting something that flared purple.
A Terran infantry gunner to Ralvex's right saw the explosions out of the corner of his eyes, turned, and joined his fire to Ralvex's.
"Priority targets, follow my tracers, all available crew served weapons in Quadrant Nine," the Terran said.
Ralvex noted his voice was cold, remote, missing the rage and uncontrolled emotions of the last two months, but not the same disassociated professionalism of when he had been trained. As if the killing and howling battle around him was nothing to be concerned about, just something to be dealt with.
It was something else, something that made the fur on his spine stand up.
His retinal link kept warning him of a red-level psychic threat that had the top bar in purple, maxed out, and 525 had his psychic screens cranked so far up that his eye sockets tingled and he could taste and smell strawberries even though he'd never tasted them before.
The Squad devoted more of their mental energies into strengthening their combined personal shielding as another heavy weapon, then another, and still another joined the first in pounding at their psychically generated shielding. The rounds were warsteel jacketed, forged in rage and fury, and the Squad felt cold logical outrage that another race would dare use their own weaponry against them and infuse it with such primal and primitive emotions instead of the cold logic of their own warsteel.
They, as one, split their minds, creating another consciousness within their own minds that could be absorbed later but right now was needed to keep the shielding up as yet another heavy weapon joined in firing on them.
They reached out with carefully honed and trained senses, feeling the temporal stream, and attempted to reach back, to rewind the battle to restore all of their forces while leaving the enemy ragged and harried from the ongoing fight, only to find the temporal stream was being threaded, metered, somehow protected from any influence except for the natural flow of the 4th Dimension.
They recoiled from something that should not be. They, the Squad, were the masters of the 4th Dimension, only they possessed the will and knowledge to not only sense it, but understand and manipulate it.
But the evidence was undeniable. There were multiple devices maintaining the temporal stream.
Worse, there were thousands of temporally locked sources on the planet. A part of their brains were devoted to nothing more than temporal perception, an entire region of their prefrontal cortex. Worse, there was a second region of their brains that could alter their perception of time, and a third that tracked with fine detail time.
The Squad reeled back from the coldly burning fire of those minds, that at each touch gave a kneejerk autonomic response of DON'T TOUCH ME! that was roared back along attempted psychic linkages.
One of the four being Squad noted that every time they touched one of those minds, those minds that the Conclave had altered to their pre-spaceflight states in brain function and tissue structure, all had a cold burning fury that seemed to know they had been touched. That being reached out and touched one.
DON'T TOUCH ME! roared back from Staff Sergeant's Zundui's subconscious and into his conscious brain and he glanced quickly to the side, where he'd felt the cold slimy touch on his mind come from.
There were four of the purple creatures, clad in iridescent robes, using focused psychic energy to keep back the hammering guns of no less than six crew served weapons.
SSG Zundui smashed a biomechanical beetle with a crysteel globe for a head out of his way, then kicked it onto its back before dumping a burst from his heavy magac battle rifle into the suddenly revealed underbelly. Purple goo and chunks of flesh showered him as he turned, his visor's static charge snapping and cleaning the goo from his visor. He shifted his hand, adjusted his aim for the three hundred meter shot, and thumbed the firing stud.
The Squad kept up the psychic energy needed to maintain the shielding as yet another weapon joined in lashing at their shield. Wasteful amounts of antimatter, warsteel, burning chemicals, enhanced phosphorus, and massive kintetic energy kept them from being able to shift any energy to attack. They combined their will, reached down into their reserves, and pushed outward, forcing their shielding almost a meter away so the ever-encroaching blasts were no longer happening a feeding tentacle from their faces.
The 40mm grenade dropped down out of the sky, in between the four, and hit the ground.
Inside the psychic shields filled with bouncing fragments of battlesteel stretched into a wire, wound around the explosive charge, and cut with notches. Thermite enhanced white phosphorous joined, bouncing around with the shrapnel until it found a home in purple flesh.
All four of the Squad screamed across the psychic wavelengths, the agony made them drop the shields.
And six 20mm autocannons obliterated them from the face of the planet.
Admiral Thennis stared at the planet below, the planet she had been defending for decades, back and forth, forwards and backwards, reliving the same battle over and over without her ships or her men restored as the enemy was, without the ships and men refreshed as time had wound back.
She could see, even from orbit, the flashes of atomic weapons. The glowing nimbus around the BOLOs as they went to war with every bit of their firepower against an enemy who was landing in strength for the three hundredth time.
Admiral Thennis pulled her attention away from the display of the planet, watching as the great black ships joined the fight. She glanced down at the communications display next to her worn and tattered crash couch.
BISMARCK> Coming to two-niner-two by sixteen reference to stellar plane. Firing main battery three.
GLOIRE> All carriers launch mayflies, ginsu and thunderpunch combinations. TF MIDWAY, concentrate guns on enemy carriers. Wahoo, go to silent running, get behind the enemy. TF NORTH SEA, move to engage the enemy's heavy warships. TF OVERLORD, prepare your Marines for boarding actions.
HOOD> WE ARE THE DEFIANT ONES! THE UNDYING ONES! VICTORY OR DEATH!
YAMATO> EITHER IS FINE!
Thennis shook her head. The text went by so fast that it was difficult to keep up.
The Black Fleet. She'd heard of it. Everyone had. It was rumors and conjecture and most naval officers didn't really believe it actually existed.
Now it was here. Engaged in battle against the enemies of TerraSol. It's reality warping weapons belching out fire and rounds the size of cattle, their forms twisted and terrible, their Captains undying and bound to their ships by chains of blood and fury.
Thennis knew the legends.
It would not leave without adding a Captain to the deck of one of its undying warships.
She felt a chill and glanced at her son, the product of a torrid decades long affair with a shipboard Marine enlistedman, and feared, in the silence of her own soul, that the Black Fleet was there for her.
More text appeared and Thennis gave the order for Task Force Tiamat to break action and fall back, put some distance between themselves and the enemy.
On her screen the orders burned with a cold violet light.
GLOIRE> Bismarck, Marat, Missouri, move forward and allow Task Force Tiamat to break action to deslush, cool, and reload.
Bellona turned at stared at the ship that kept trying to hide in the shadows of other ships, in shadows of debris. She could sense the pulsing psychic tendrils from that ship linking the enemy fleet together, attempting to reach beyond the battle to elsewhere.
"Gloire, time to Hellspace arrival?" she asked, her voice clear and pure in the absolute vacuum of her command deck.
"First arrivals in eight minutes, Captain," the Gloire's Operating Mind informed her, the voice crisp and sure in the vacuum.
"Transmit to Task Force Tiamat we have incoming reinforcements. Inform planetside that they have relief coming," she ordered.
GLOIRE TO ADMIRAL THENNIS COMMANDING> Eight Minutes Until Reinforcements in Strength.
GLOIRE TO ALL PLANETSIDE ELEMENTS> Eight Minutes Until Reinforcements
The message flashed on Ralvex's visor as he lashed at the Precursor tank with his heavy cannon, blowing apart battlesteel treads and running gear.
"STAMPY HELP!" the robot squealed as the Battlefield Tactical Network informed him that there would be a five second gap where a main gun shot would not endanger any friendly forces or interrupt their attacks.
The 80mm Hellbore detonated on the second rank of tanks, the 125kt blast shattering battlesteel.
Mukstet's instruments sparked as the EMP washed over his striker. The fireball bloomed, reached toward him, then he was inside of it, his instruments seeking out the enemy vehicles that had survived, running off of power source detection only. He could feel the pull of the superheated air cooling and pulling back to form the mushroom cloud, feel the suction on his striker.
His two door gunners kept firing, the fireball kept at bay by the battlescreens even as it faded to a debris cloud.
Mukstet's striker whipped through the mushroom cloud, his three wingmates right behind him, going low against and banking to come around and strafe the other side of the battlefield.
------------
Punee was asleep on the floor, tired out from her attempts to walk. Her face was smeared with biter cookie and slobber mixed together, and her little feet kept kicking. Tru and Elu were reading their dataslates as Dambree watched.
She heard the rumble of the battle off in the distance and glanced at Mister Mewmew. Mister Mewmew didn't do anything more than keep showing the little 'zzzzz' on his face screen so Dambree took another drink of her fizzybrew and went back to reading.
She knew, someday, that those noises would stop.
Dambree glanced at the end table where she'd set the pistol then over at Nee to make sure they weren't entertaining one another. Satisfied her half-feral sister was still asleep, she went back to sipping on her fizzybrew and reading.
It was fascinating stuff that Mister Mewmew had gotten from whoever Mister Daisy was a few days ago when there had been earth trembles for nearly two hours.
-------------------
MANTID FREE WORLDS
Something feels weird.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
How so, sis?
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
MANTID FREE WORLDS
It's nothing I can put my fingers on, just something feels off.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
Yeah, same here. There's something weird going on.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TELKAN FORGE WORLDS
It felt like someone was touching my brain for a moment, but it went away.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TNVARU PEOPLE
I didn't feel anything.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
AKLTAK SOARING WORLDS
Me neither.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT
I didn't either.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
MANTID FREE WORLDS
Maybe it's nothing.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
One of the interesting features of Terran Descent Humanity is their apparent weakness. A cursory inspection of any inter-species relationship with the Terrans will show that the species that encounters them, without fail, always draws the wrong conclusions. Even those who study the history of Humanity often draws the wrong conclusion due to something that the Humans call 'confirmation bias' or, in more layman's terms, 'I prefer my own facts' when examining humanity.The reason for this is galactic evolution. The Great Filters create what Terrans call 'one trick ponies' to get past the Great Filters. With only Humanity as the exception, every race who has achieved faster than light travel and managed to settle more than a dozen systems follow the same historical and cultural patterns. Cooperation, conformity, and what the Humans sneeringly refer to as 'the Greater Good.'Yes, yes, I see you students who's races subscribe the Greater Good theory chafing back there. Calm yourself. There are factions of Humanity who subscribe to the Greater Good theories, but Humanity as a whole does not. Too often in Human history the Greater Good has led to mass extinction, slaughter, and, ultimately, war, as what one group of Humanity perceives as 'The Greater Good' is seen by another group as 'Totally without redeeming qualities inhumane horror' and those groups eventually clash.That is not to say Humanity is perfect and the pinnacle of Galactic races. They are just as capable of cruelty, spitefulness, and pettiness as any other race.They just do it well.When it comes to temporal manipulation the Terrans avoided the Great Temporal Filter by realizing, quite early when their work was still in the theoretical phases, that any change to the time stream inevitably resulted in the worst possible result for the manipulator. Eventually, before the first temporal lens was created to look back into the past and to aid in exiting superluminal travel modes, they discovered that, mathematically, the universe dislikes anyone meddling in the 4th Dimension as that is one of the primary overarching bedrocks upon which even the Big Bang rests.The Terrans proved, with math and equations, that the more you mess with the time stream, the more the universe seeks to ensure that you end up with the worst possible outcome, and further attempts to change it will result in even more less than optimal outcomes. With science and reason they proved that the act of observing a particle changes its state. Temporal mechanics means that the state of particles are changed by the act of observing them once they have been observed, changing them even further, which causes what the Humans determined to be 'sub-quantum paradox events' which, inevitably, lead to the worst conclusion possible.With that, let us discuss the Khatri Temporal Skirmishes. Turn or scroll your textbooks to page 328 and prepare your note taking devices.Pre-Glassing Terra suffered from multiple genocidal purges of millions or even hundreds of millions of people. The most famous and indelibly marked in the Terran psyche was the Khatri Provincial Realignment, in which over nine hundred million Humans were killed in a methodical industrial genocide in the course of two years. Temporal researchers attempted to stop the rise of the Cult of the Iron Cow by traveling back in time, resulting in...--Excerpt From: Non-Conventional Warfare: Failures and Dangers, East Point Military Academy, Hamburger Kingdom, Xenospecies Academy Annex, Third Year Required Instruction for All Cadets---------------------Mukstet rolled, taking the missile hit on the compressed graviton belly band, then righted, feathered the port engine so the craft slewed to the right without changing momentum angle, and cut loose with his 25mm cannons. The heavy rounds hammered into the infantry that had managed to crawl from a downed dropship, twisted and warped flesh exploding as the rounds passed through the target to hit the ground and explode. He kicked the port engine back into full power, ignoring the screaming shudder of the overstressed drive, and swung back in line with his forward momentum.He was in the zone.He dropped down, his wingmates with him, until the graviton eddies under his craft tore up dirt, mud, grass, and debris, spraying it behind him in a rooster tail, his forward guns clearing the path of any enemy, his door gunners hammering Pontiac Vindicator hatred into the enemy as he passed.Some psionic-enhanced rounds punched through his forward battlescreen and his wavering psychic shielding, slamming into the armaglass of the cockpit, shattering it into the pilot's seat even as the last energy of the rounds exploded memory-foam from the seat itself."973, rotate out the psychic shielding emitters, change the wavelength algorithm, they're getting through," he said, his voice calm even though death had missed him by hitting the wrong seat.--roger roger gravity pump online-- 973 sent back, turning and hurrying away from the port side graviton engine. He squeezed into the maintenance space even as the craft buzzed and hummed and vibrated around him. The psychic shielding had to be done manually to prevent outside forces from rotating the emitters.PSYCHIC PSYCHIC PSYCHIC appeared in Mukstet's vision as he pulled back the stick, coming around in a looping twisting turn that sent him on a strafing run at a ninety-degree angle from his previous attack."973?" he started to say.His mouth filled with the taste of electric blueberries and sizzling hamburger grease, his teeth all itched and tickled below the gum-line.The Terrans in the back stopped firing for a long second."You guys all right back there?" Mukstet asked.Another second passed."Yeah, yeah, we're fine," Sergeant Arora said, his voice perfectly level and calm. "Engaging targets, prioritizing light mechanized and infantry."Mukstet frowned. Sixty seconds ago both Terrans had been yelling as they fired the guns. The loss of Terran emotional controls had been a problem for the last two months, a problem that everyone had gotten used to."Engaging targets," Sergeant Khwaja said, his voice perfectly calm. "Prioritizing light mechanized and infantry units."He put it out of his mind as he saw a massive Precursor vessel hit the ground, the side doors dropping down. He thumbed the rocker switch and the missile pods under each of the striker's stubby wings chuffed out a pair of missiles, his neural link already having determined targets. The missile's warbois howled with insane glee as they surged forward, grav-drives kicking in, and they spun up the small coil of madness and rage within their warheads.Only one of the missiles hit, coming in low then arcing up to detonate just over the clamshell doors. A loud THRUMMMMmmm went off even as a purplish halo erupted from the white spike of the missile that touched the ground and reached meters into the sky.Hundreds of creatures were revealed, many of them convulsing, firing weapons unwillingly as their synapses misfired, more than a few of the blue-lit globes suddenly splashed with ravaged neural tissue and going dark as the contained brains detonated.The rest of Foxtrot-Niner Wing Bravo's psychic munition rockets hit and exploded, the point defense systems shattered and the linkages burning with stray psychic impulses even as the warboi howled with glee having jumped from the missile and into the phased radar array buffer of the massive dropship.The munitions didn't hurt the ground, but the Precursor's warsteel machines, forged in great psychic foundries, ignited and began to melt, the living tissue, both Hesstlan and other was scorched, flayed, and rent."Come around, give it to them again," Mukstet growled."Engaging," one of the Terrans said, his voice almost flat and monotone.Mukstet didn't have time to worry about that as he swung the around and arced up, rolling his striker so the Immelmann Turn ended with him diving back down to the deck as his wingmates went through their twisting reversals.ATOMIC ATOMIC ATOMIC Mukstet was warned, his HUD telling him the burst would be three miles up and straight into the face of a city-sized craft. His systems let him know he'd be able to handle the EMP pulse, his craft's shielding rated in the megawatts, but he still glanced to make sure the mechanical systems were primed."STAMPY HELP!"Stampy fired straight up, quivering with glee, as the 80mm Hellbore round sliced through the Precursor landing force's lighter craft even though a half-dozen tried to interpose themselves between Stampy's shot and the massive Precursor vessel that had necessary fab units and reinforcements.And a four member battle-squad.Aboard the ship the group, referred to as a squad, saw the oncoming nuclear round, the compressed and directed nuclear blast wrapped in a howling storm of electrons arranged into attack programs somehow and brought up their psychic shielding.On the ground was absolute anarchy and howling fury. The Conclave had reached back in time to gentle the new Mantid servitor caste, but that didn't seem to have worked, which was impossible. The Conclave were masters of time and space, the Mantid servitors, labels Species Twenty-Three, should be incapable on an intellectual and emotional level of engaging in violence after thousands of years of cooperation to achieve space flight.Instead, there was something else.The Squad yanked their attention from the carnage below as Stampy's shot raced upwards. They pushed more psychic power into the shielding, sneering at the pathetic nuclear shots from the ground.That was the moment an asshole in orbit, trained by his mother to run the mass driver cannon, spotted the Precursor dropship, figured 'why not', and fired a 250mm round the size of a telephone pole rather than empty out the chamber since he was in the middle of switching ammunition types. He fired it, didn't bother to run targeting, just fired it by eye, then swung his systems around to bring his targeting computers to bear on the massive ship that had tried to hide behind Hesstla's moon.The Squad realized that they were about to be hit by two rounds, either one they could handle, but both at the same time was too much, and reached down to the ground with their powers.They blinked out of existence from the ship, feeling the burning scrape of Hellspace touch them as they reappeared on the ground.Ralvex blinked as his autocannon hit something on the ground between the end of his barrel and the quartet of heavy Precursor tanks. He reflexively dialed up the cyclic rate from 250 as the rounds hit, exploded, and kept hitting something that flared purple.A Terran infantry gunner to Ralvex's right saw the explosions out of the corner of his eyes, turned, and joined his fire to Ralvex's."Priority targets, follow my tracers, all available crew served weapons in Quadrant Nine," the Terran said.Ralvex noted his voice was cold, remote, missing the rage and uncontrolled emotions of the last two months, but not the same disassociated professionalism of when he had been trained. As if the killing and howling battle around him was nothing to be concerned about, just something to be dealt with.It was something else, something that made the fur on his spine stand up.His retinal link kept warning him of a red-level psychic threat that had the top bar in purple, maxed out, and 525 had his psychic screens cranked so far up that his eye sockets tingled and he could taste and smell strawberries even though he'd never tasted them before.The Squad devoted more of their mental energies into strengthening their combined personal shielding as another heavy weapon, then another, and still another joined the first in pounding at their psychically generated shielding. The rounds were warsteel jacketed, forged in rage and fury, and the Squad felt cold logical outrage that another race would dare use their own weaponry against them and infuse it with such primal and primitive emotions instead of the cold logic of their own warsteel.They, as one, split their minds, creating another consciousness within their own minds that could be absorbed later but right now was needed to keep the shielding up as yet another heavy weapon joined in firing on them.They reached out with carefully honed and trained senses, feeling the temporal stream, and attempted to reach back, to rewind the battle to restore all of their forces while leaving the enemy ragged and harried from the ongoing fight, only to find the temporal stream was being threaded, metered, somehow protected from any influence except for the natural flow of the 4th Dimension.They recoiled from something that should not be. They, the Squad, were the masters of the 4th Dimension, only they possessed the will and knowledge to not only sense it, but understand and manipulate it.But the evidence was undeniable. There were multiple devices maintaining the temporal stream.Worse, there were thousands of temporally locked sources on the planet. A part of their brains were devoted to nothing more than temporal perception, an entire region of their prefrontal cortex. Worse, there was a second region of their brains that could alter their perception of time, and a third that tracked with fine detail time.The Squad reeled back from the coldly burning fire of those minds, that at each touch gave a kneejerk autonomic response of DON'T TOUCH ME! that was roared back along attempted psychic linkages.One of the four being Squad noted that every time they touched one of those minds, those minds that the Conclave had altered to their pre-spaceflight states in brain function and tissue structure, all had a cold burning fury that seemed to know they had been touched. That being reached out and touched one.DON'T TOUCH ME! roared back from Staff Sergeant's Zundui's subconscious and into his conscious brain and he glanced quickly to the side, where he'd felt the cold slimy touch on his mind come from.There were four of the purple creatures, clad in iridescent robes, using focused psychic energy to keep back the hammering guns of no less than six crew served weapons.SSG Zundui smashed a biomechanical beetle with a crysteel globe for a head out of his way, then kicked it onto its back before dumping a burst from his heavy magac battle rifle into the suddenly revealed underbelly. Purple goo and chunks of flesh showered him as he turned, his visor's static charge snapping and cleaning the goo from his visor. He shifted his hand, adjusted his aim for the three hundred meter shot, and thumbed the firing stud.The Squad kept up the psychic energy needed to maintain the shielding as yet another weapon joined in lashing at their shield. Wasteful amounts of antimatter, warsteel, burning chemicals, enhanced phosphorus, and massive kintetic energy kept them from being able to shift any energy to attack. They combined their will, reached down into their reserves, and pushed outward, forcing their shielding almost a meter away so the ever-encroaching blasts were no longer happening a feeding tentacle from their faces.The 40mm grenade dropped down out of the sky, in between the four, and hit the ground.Inside the psychic shields filled with bouncing fragments of battlesteel stretched into a wire, wound around the explosive charge, and cut with notches. Thermite enhanced white phosphorous joined, bouncing around with the shrapnel until it found a home in purple flesh.All four of the Squad screamed across the psychic wavelengths, the agony made them drop the shields.And six 20mm autocannons obliterated them from the face of the planet.Admiral Thennis stared at the planet below, the planet she had been defending for decades, back and forth, forwards and backwards, reliving the same battle over and over without her ships or her men restored as the enemy was, without the ships and men refreshed as time had wound back.She could see, even from orbit, the flashes of atomic weapons. The glowing nimbus around the BOLOs as they went to war with every bit of their firepower against an enemy who was landing in strength for the three hundredth time.Admiral Thennis pulled her attention away from the display of the planet, watching as the great black ships joined the fight. She glanced down at the communications display next to her worn and tattered crash couch.BISMARCK Coming to two-niner-two by sixteen reference to stellar plane. Firing main battery three.GLOIRE All carriers launch mayflies, ginsu and thunderpunch combinations. TF MIDWAY, concentrate guns on enemy carriers. Wahoo, go to silent running, get behind the enemy. TF NORTH SEA, move to engage the enemy's heavy warships. TF OVERLORD, prepare your Marines for boarding actions.HOOD WE ARE THE DEFIANT ONES! THE UNDYING ONES! VICTORY OR DEATH!YAMATO EITHER IS FINE!Thennis shook her head. The text went by so fast that it was difficult to keep up.The Black Fleet. She'd heard of it. Everyone had. It was rumors and conjecture and most naval officers didn't really believe it actually existed.Now it was here. Engaged in battle against the enemies of TerraSol. It's reality warping weapons belching out fire and rounds the size of cattle, their forms twisted and terrible, their Captains undying and bound to their ships by chains of blood and fury.Thennis knew the legends.It would not leave without adding a Captain to the deck of one of its undying warships.She felt a chill and glanced at her son, the product of a torrid decades long affair with a shipboard Marine enlistedman, and feared, in the silence of her own soul, that the Black Fleet was there for her.More text appeared and Thennis gave the order for Task Force Tiamat to break action and fall back, put some distance between themselves and the enemy.On her screen the orders burned with a cold violet light.GLOIRE Bismarck, Marat, Missouri, move forward and allow Task Force Tiamat to break action to deslush, cool, and reload.Bellona turned at stared at the ship that kept trying to hide in the shadows of other ships, in shadows of debris. She could sense the pulsing psychic tendrils from that ship linking the enemy fleet together, attempting to reach beyond the battle to elsewhere."Gloire, time to Hellspace arrival?" she asked, her voice clear and pure in the absolute vacuum of her command deck."First arrivals in eight minutes, Captain," the Gloire's Operating Mind informed her, the voice crisp and sure in the vacuum."Transmit to Task Force Tiamat we have incoming reinforcements. Inform planetside that they have relief coming," she ordered.GLOIRE TO ADMIRAL THENNIS COMMANDING Eight Minutes Until Reinforcements in Strength.GLOIRE TO ALL PLANETSIDE ELEMENTS Eight Minutes Until ReinforcementsThe message flashed on Ralvex's visor as he lashed at the Precursor tank with his heavy cannon, blowing apart battlesteel treads and running gear."STAMPY HELP!" the robot squealed as the Battlefield Tactical Network informed him that there would be a five second gap where a main gun shot would not endanger any friendly forces or interrupt their attacks.The 80mm Hellbore detonated on the second rank of tanks, the 125kt blast shattering battlesteel.Mukstet's instruments sparked as the EMP washed over his striker. The fireball bloomed, reached toward him, then he was inside of it, his instruments seeking out the enemy vehicles that had survived, running off of power source detection only. He could feel the pull of the superheated air cooling and pulling back to form the mushroom cloud, feel the suction on his striker.His two door gunners kept firing, the fireball kept at bay by the battlescreens even as it faded to a debris cloud.Mukstet's striker whipped through the mushroom cloud, his three wingmates right behind him, going low against and banking to come around and strafe the other side of the battlefield.------------Punee was asleep on the floor, tired out from her attempts to walk. Her face was smeared with biter cookie and slobber mixed together, and her little feet kept kicking. Tru and Elu were reading their dataslates as Dambree watched.She heard the rumble of the battle off in the distance and glanced at Mister Mewmew. Mister Mewmew didn't do anything more than keep showing the little 'zzzzz' on his face screen so Dambree took another drink of her fizzybrew and went back to reading.She knew, someday, that those noises would stop.Dambree glanced at the end table where she'd set the pistol then over at Nee to make sure they weren't entertaining one another. Satisfied her half-feral sister was still asleep, she went back to sipping on her fizzybrew and reading.It was fascinating stuff that Mister Mewmew had gotten from whoever Mister Daisy was a few days ago when there had been earth trembles for nearly two hours.-------------------MANTID FREE WORLDSSomething feels weird.---NOTHING FOLLOWS---DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMSHow so, sis?---NOTHING FOLLOWS---MANTID FREE WORLDSIt's nothing I can put my fingers on, just something feels off.---NOTHING FOLLOWS---TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDSYeah, same here. There's something weird going on.---NOTHING FOLLOWS---TELKAN FORGE WORLDSIt felt like someone was touching my brain for a moment, but it went away.---NOTHING FOLLOWS---TNVARU PEOPLEI didn't feel anything.---NOTHING FOLLOWS---AKLTAK SOARING WORLDSMe neither.---NOTHING FOLLOWS---RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACTI didn't either.---NOTHING FOLLOWS---MANTID FREE WORLDSMaybe it's nothing.---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
