Chapter 645: The Spoked Offensive

"Humanity views their five year assault on what they call "Anthill" that we called "Mantid Prime" to be a complete disaster. Of throwing good money after bad.

"However, from a Mantid point of view, it was the most terrifying thing that had ever occurred.

"We had struck at their 'queens', going after their seats of power. According to our intelligence we had caught a majority of their fleet 'at anchor' and disabled it. Of course, we were unaware that a full 80% of their fleet, who's numbers were extremely guarded and we did not have sufficient intelligence on, had mobilized with full troop loadouts to fight what would have been the Third Colony War.

"The Terrans had resisted our invasions, stopped us dead. Every system was still under contention.

"Then, out of the blue, when they should have been devoting all of those troops to take back their home systems, just like every other race had, they directly struck at Mantid Prime.

"They jumped in and fought their way through the Mantid System Guard, then made orbital landings on Mantid Prime. A full half of the first wave mat-trans'd to the surface, the other half came down in orbital strike pods.

"Within hours the humans had carved out beachheads, were landing their seconds waves.

"They had suffered thousands of casualties.

"We had suffered millions. Four Hive Cities were under direct assault.

"Within a month they landed wherever they wanted. Their K/D ratio was 1,257:1.

"A month in and they destroyed a Hive City. The Queen had been evacuated, but they destroyed it outright, detonating one of their powered armor suits inside the Hive City.Sergeant Steakley's biography, Armor, goes into more detail than I shall here.

"Suffice to say, the Terrans were having more success on Mantid Prime than we were having on TerraSol.

"It was terrifying, horrifying, and utterly impossible to the Mantid. The Mantid were the ones who attacked the Queen, who crushed all who were before them. Never had anyone assaulted out core worlds. Never had anyone landed on our Hive Homes and brought the fight to us.

"We had soldiers without number, we could grow a warrior in less than six days, grow its black shelled servitors in a single day. We were the biological pinnacle of the universe.

"The Terrans didn't care. They just kept coming. Kept landing. Kept fighting. Sought out columns of warriors numbering in the hundreds of thousands to drop mat-trans troops right in the middle of the column by the dozens to slay the entire column.

"They were fast, they were brutal, they were strong, they were lethal. Pound for pound, they outclassed the warrior caste, which was the culmination of over a hundred million years of biological engineering, in every way.

"That was without armor.

"Wrapped in armor, with their cybernetic enhancements that even enhanced their phasic abilities, they were an unstoppable force. It took everything Mantid Prime had just to keep them from owning the planet within hours.

"Everyone disregards Combined Military Authority Armed Forces troops' impossible task and unyielding victories, pointing at the unsuccessful siege of Mantid Prime. What they ignore is that during that time, they forced us to defend our Hive Worlds as landings happened across thirty different systems.

"The Siege of Mantid Prime was the worst, from Mantid point of view.

"We had faced foes with power armor before. They have weaknesses, mainly the thought to action delay. The fact that phasic energy strikes from warrior bladearms penetrated armor quite easily.

"Humans had no such delay. Whether it was the cybernetic cortex linkage or the more esoteric telemechanic linkages, thought and action, even action without thought and reflexive action, were instant with their power armor. Their armor was warsteel, which blunted or disrupted the phasic bladearm extensions.

"Their rage, their wrath, their insane howling hatred roared out from them. Even dead, a Mantid could taste their hatred and rage for hours, days.

"The Pubvians died enmasse in the first week. The last of the Pubvians, driven to madness to the point of self-extinction.

"The Combine just landed more troops and killed.

"It took tens of thousands of warriors to overrun and destroy only a few hundred Combine troops.

"The Queens marched the warrior caste in, got to the point where the Worker Caste was thrown into battle. Gone were Mantid tactics, the delicate thrust and counter thrust. We only had numbers.

"And we were still losing.

"By the five year mark, when the Republic collapsed, the Combined Military Forces had suffered over a million casualties.

"They killed eighteen billion Mantid warriors alone. Two hundred thousand Speakers. Destroyed eight Hive Cities, had forced the Overqueens and the Omniqueens to retreat to shelters deep inside the bedrock.

"The featureless black armor of the Terran Combine induced nightmares in the Queens. The silent, implacable advance of a column of a hundred Combine Marines was such a thing of dread that Speakers had to compel the warriors lest the warriors flee from the wave of hatred and wrath that extended out for literal miles from the Combine forces.

"The deserts of Mantid Prime were a graveyard.

"It didn't matter that the air was poisonous to them, the water was poisonous to them, that there was nothing on the surface for them to eat or to sustain them.

"They fought with a clarity of purpose that their hatred and wrath did not diminish. Months turned to years and still they landed troops. More ships arrived, carrying more troops. Their tactics evolved, their weapons grew stronger, their armor designs were beginning to change.

"They did not know, could not know, that we had been on the edge of defeat. For the first time in Mantid history, the Mantid were the ones losing to someone other than another hive.

"Only the collapse of the Third Republic and the rise of the Terran Holy Imperium had saved us.

"Of course, the war would drag on for another twenty years and claim tens of billions of more lives." - Mantid Historian Utters the Truth of the Past, from his work Oh, Mantid, Pride Be Thy Downfall, 55 PG

Natraya ducked underneath the swiping bladearm and, giving a bird of prey cry of her own, jammed the sword in her hand under the spawn's chin, next to the thin neck, and wrenched it to the side even as she threw herself backwards.

The creature spewed ichor from the wound, giving a bubbling screech, and collapsed.

On'trak smashed the heavy metal bar, a floor support girder, against the thorax of one of the slavespawn, giving a roar of his own, and the insectile spawn was thrown against the wall, shattered. On'trak slammed one foot on the floor, like he'd seen the lemur do, and swung the girder overhand.

FWOOP!

"KIAI!" the lemur screamed out.

"HAI!" On'trak roared into the rippling cone even as it struck him full. He felt his skin ripple, his muscles tremble, and his brain start to numb until the high pitched cry and his own roar suddenly cleared his mind.

On'trak grimaced even as he swung the girder from over his head and brought it down on the Dweller.

The Dweller was smashed to the floor in a heap, the phasic shield exploding into purple sparks and arcs of hair thin lightning that coursed over On'trak's body. On'trak gave another bellow, forcing rage to the surface of his normally calm mind, forcing the rage out of his mouth in a vocal denial of the Dweller's power.

When he turned he saw two of the largest spawn he had ever seen go from moving on all eight limbs to raising their thorax up and starting to unlimber their bladearms. They had to slouch, curl slightly, too tall to stand fully upright in the room.

Behind them were four Dwellers.

Without thinking he leaned back as he pulled the girder behind him and, with an explosive exhalation that was more than a grunt of effort, he threw the girder at the right hand one.

It spun end over end, making a fluttering noise.

The spawn screamed as it hit the upper carapace, slammed into the thorax.

The scream turned bubbly as the thorax exploded.

On'trak turned, grabbed the bladearm of a dead spawn, stuck his thumb in the joint like the lemur had shown him, and twisted the bladearm off, holding the round section tight in his fist.

The second one went down from a fussilade of crystal shards, each of the shards penetrating deeply before exploding in a flash of phasic energy.

One of the Dwellers behind the collapsing spawn turned toward Natraya and On'trak tensed.

The empty pistol flew through the air in an arc and hit the Dweller right in the huge left eye.

The Dweller screeched, its hands coming up to its wounded eye. The others all wiggled their tentacles in alarm.

Natraya screamed as she charged across the room, her little legs pumping, both hands around the 'handle' of the twisted off bladearm.

"YOU KILLED HER!"

Before the Dweller's could react much more than jostle at each other to get a clear shot with their crushing psychic attack, Natraya reached the one covering its eye.

The bladearm shattered the thin purple phasic shield, sparks exploding from the impact point.

She drove the point into the Dweller's guts, still shrieking.

The lemur charged and On'trak blinked. To his eyes it looked like the lemur flashed across the distance of the large room. There was a blurred streak, then the lemur appeared, a still image, and the streak continued to the next still image, the blurred streak line bent in five different angles, each bent point showing the lemur as a still image in the middle of moving.

Natraya pulled the bladearm out and slammed it in again.

"HOW DO YOU LIKE BEING KILLED?" she screamed.

On'trak could tell the Dweller didn't like it very much.

-----

Shandaar watched, keeping the majority of her thoughts and, what the Cult called 'feelings', from the communal mind. To anyone in the communal mind who would have bothered to check, she was merely watching and listening, heavy protections that others used to protect themselves from the Mad Lemur's radiating malevolent glee.

**see how the Madness spreads** the Ancient One whispered.

**now the Tukna'rn is becoming Maddened** Shandaar answered.

In the middle of the room was a psychic recreation of where the lemur and its two companions were. It often blurred, distorted, or dissolved into smears of color, but several Ancient Ones were using their vast power to reestablish and keep it connected.

The Tukna'rn roared and threw the floor support overhand at one of the more deadly slavespawn that were small enough to use inside the ship. The slavespawn's thorax exploded and Shandaar could 'taste' the flat focused rage even through the psychic construct.

**the lemur has something in its chest, behind the bone plate at the forward joining of its ribs** one of the Ancient Ones watching the psychic hologram said. **see how it keeps touching there after being wounded**

**perhaps some sort of medical device to cure its wounds** another Ancient One suggested.

The Ancient One beside Shandaar, who had shared with Shandaar that it was a he, rolled his eyes.

**it is a reflex, a habit, that may have to do with the way it fights despite being unarmed** the Ancient One put into the communal mind.

**a lemur is never unarmed a lemur is merely dangerous or has been dead for several days and is now merely poisonous** Shandaar whispered.

The Ancient One beside her wiggled his fingers in amusement.

**awaken servitor robots with attuned harvested cerebral tissue** one of the Ancient Ones in charge ordered. **they will kill the lemur and its too servitors**

Shandaar looked at the Ancient One next to her.

**or just enrage it when it sees the brains** Shandaar said.

**whatever will be the worst outcome is what will happen** the Ancient One whispered, wiggling his fingers in concern. **we should plan to flee**

**I shall take the long way and check the evacuation buds** Shandaar said. She glanced up. **be careful, brother**

**and you, sister**

-----

"Looks like the last of them for right now," the lemur said, moving around the bodies. He picked up a shard pistol and tossed it to Natraya.

She was proud of herself that she caught it without bruising her fingers or dropping it.

"What do we do now?" Natraya asked.

The lemur held up one finger, which Natraya had learned meant to pause for a moment. The lemur went through a slow series of movements, again reminding Natraya of the Bongistan Royal Ballet Society that her mistress had loved so much. At the end he grimaced.

"Body's not quite at peak performance. Strained a length of muscle fiber in my thigh," the lemur said softly. "Anyway, we'll head down the direction that the enemy came from. Seek out the enemy and destroy him and eventually you discover his origin point, allowing you to wipe out his reserves."

Natraya nodded.

A Dweller suddenly flickered and appeared, pointing at the lemur.

The lemur spun in place, his foot (surrounded by a blue nimbus) sweeping through the phasic hologram.

It vanished with a pop.

Shandaar watched with carefully guarded amusement as the Young One who had attempted to psionically project next to the lemur was thrown across the room to crash against the wall. The Young One was alive, but stunned, as it slid down the wall.

"Now, which way?" the lemur mused. There were two doors that Dwellers and their servants had entered the room from.

"I can tell you," the voice came from midair, almost coated with slime.

Another Dweller appeared and before the lemur could react it spoke.

"If I let you escape will you leave?" it asked, its voice cold and sibilant, almost dripping with slime.

"Maybe," the lemur grinned.

"That way," the Dweller said, pointing at a door.

To Natraya's (not so) surprise, the lemur gave a goofy sounding laugh and ran through the other door.

"No, not that way! The other way! OK, take the next left! No! Not that way!" the Dweller said.

Natraya and On'trak laughed as they followed the lemur.

-----

**well that worked amazingly** Shandaar whispered. **the lemur obviously is in a great hurry to return home**

**possibly for a doctor appointment** the other Ancient One whispered back, wiggling his fingers in amusement.

**his annual killing power increase** Shadaar whispered.

The other Ancient Ones turned and stared at the Ancient One next to Shandaar when it suddenly made a gurgling sound of laughter.

**the lemur is heading straight for the slavespawn readiness chamber and you think it's funny** one of the Ancient Ones asked across the communal mind, outrage tinging it thoughts.

**I do and I'm tired of pretending it's not** the Ancient One said, gurgling again.

Shandaar barely managed to keep from gurgling her own amusement.