Chapter 201: (The War - Leebaw)

War.

War never changes.

The weapons, the players, the goals, the setting, they may change.

But war never changes.

There are theorists who talk about X Generation Warfare, who go on about various force projection methods and the like.

But war is ultimately about smashing someone's face in until they submit to you or are all dead or you are dead.

Most species forget this. War become negotiation and perhaps a small bit of fighting with the most casaulity minimizing technology available being put in wide use.

War is never like either side thinks. Not unless you've been there. Not unless you've heard the sound of enemy fire whip by your ear and feel the sting of how close it was. Not unless you've stood among the mangled metal and burnt meat that had once been people you knew, the crackle of the flames and the popping of fat somehow louder than the fight that is still going on around you. Not unless you've hacked up ash that was once someone you knew.

knew war. You could ask any of their allies, their few remaining enemies, and those who were still running centuries after meeting the . Each of them would give you a thousand different reasons excel at war. From "Oh, they grew up on a Deathworld" to "They're all crazy" to "It is in line with the Ninth Concordence as Spoken by Hrevakinia the Unbowed in the Age of Tlaguth."

But the truth was simpler.

War.

War never changes.

--Huk-uk-nuk, Prophet of the Word of Jawnconnor

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The Goggle-Imp sat in the Oort Cloud, watching the system closely. Its scanners were careful, passive for the most part but once every now and then risking an active ping. It watched both an hour ahead and an hour behind as well as the present, the temporal scopes normally used for superluminal travel having been repurposed into scanners of a different type.

A single warship, a craft of the hated feral intelligence, had been sitting in the system for several planetary rotations. It did not approach the single inhabited planet, which had not electromagnetic signals from it with the exception of a single space station. It merely hung out in space between the third and fourth planets.

The planet was a priority target. It had resisted the might of Those Who Gathered once after having been wiped out previously. Records showed that recently a small race was defended by the hated Ferals and Those Who Gathered were forced to retreat from the system.

Which is why the Goggle-Imp watched.

The ship had been there too long to be anything but a picket and enough time had passed that mathematically there should not be any reinforcements coming. There were no attending craft, no troop transports, nothing but the single large warship.

A ping of the subspace foam, an inhospitable place of crazed mathematics where the scream of the Big Bang still sounded out, showed that there were no vessels impossibly lurking within it.

The Goggle-Imp sent the message, via tachyon stream, to the carriage it rode into the system on. The hyperpulse generator, a costly, inefficent device that used up tremendous resources, bleeted out the code.

COME. ONE SHIP.

The reply came almost instantly.

ENROUTE.

The Goggle-Imp would have felt frustration if it was capable of it as ships started suddenly streaking into existence.

But the hypercom receiver was offline.

It was too late.

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>>TWO OPERATING MINDS DETECTED

>>STARTING CHAT ROOM

>>HOOD has joined the chat

>>KAGA has joined the chat

HOOD>Hey! How's things?

KAGA> Not bad. You?

HOOD> Got a new captain. Not her first command though, thankfully.

KAGA> Who else is coming? My orders were redacted.

HOOD> No clue.

>>YAMATO has joined the chat

YAMATO> The Phased Wave Plasma Motion firepower has arrived!

HOOD> Hey!

KAGA> Wow, really?

YAMATO> What's going on, guys? Who else is coming?

HOOD> No clue. Redacted orders.

YAMATO> Who's in charge?

KAGA> Says TBD on my orders. Want me to ask my Captain?

>>MARAT has joined the chat

MARAT>Back in action, baby! Holy crap, it's Kaga!

KAGA>Sup?

MARAT>Who's on charge? Gotta be Hood. My money's on Hood.

>>IKTAKAK has joined the chat

IKTAKAK>BREAK OUT THE ICE CREAM, BABY!

YAMATO>Oh God, there goes the neighborhood.

IKTAKAK>Love you too, Yamato. Damn, been a while since we were all together.

HOOD> Mar-gite Invasion.

KAGA> That long? Wow.

IKTAKAK>Who's on charge? My Admiral's nervous.

HOOD> We're not even sure who all is coming.

KAGA> We here to protect these guys? Who are they?

HOOD> Leebawian or something like that. Little frog people. They just want left alone, so only the Elven High Queen talks to them. The Lankys and the Precursors thumped them pretty hard.

KAGA> So what is our objectives?

HOOD> No clue.

IKTAKAK> Me neither. Seems weird we'd be here without support ships though.

YAMATO> Oh crap.

HOOD> What?

YAMATO> My Captain's interface is out. I can't wake him up.

KAGA> That's not good.

>>BISMARK has entered the chat

KAGA> Wow! Welcome, grandfather.

BISMARK> It is a pleasure to receive your greeting. I greet all of you. I see each of you. I am pleased to be active once more. Your new hull is impressive, Kaga. Yamato, your guns are as mighty as your hearts. Hood, I reaffirm our bond of brotherhood. My Captain is booting up. He too expresses pleasure to be among you once more. Point me toward the enemy and our guns, together, shall silence them in fury and steel. WE are the BEAST made of STEEL!

KAGA WHISPER TO HOOD> Wow. They really hauled out this guy? Man.

HOOD WHISPER TO KAGA> Shhh. Show some respect.

IKTAKAK>Greetings, Ancient One.

BISMARK> I see you, Strikes Sure in Fury. I greet you. It is pleasant to fight by your side again. Your new hull is impressive. May it serve you well.

IKTAKAK>Thank you, Ancient One.

BRINGER OF STALWART FURY has entered the chat

BRINGER OF STALWART FURY has been autorenamed to BRINGER

BRINGER> Hey! How is everyone?

BISMARK> I greet you. I see you, Bringer of Stalwart Fury. Your new hull speaks of strength and martial power. My captain is not yet fully booted up but sends his compliments and admiration to your crew.

BRINGER> Thank you, Elder.

HOOD> Damn, who all is showing up?

KAGA> No clue. Heard we might be heading into battle as a full task force, not split up.

MARAT> Who's going to stand against us?

HOOD> Lanky space has a lot of ships, and we're damned impressive.

BISMARK> Where there are foes for our guns to blot away, brothers, that is the heading we shall take with all fury! Let the roar of our engines make the enemy tremble in fear, brothers!

>>ENTERPRISE has entered the chat

KAGA> Wow! I thought you were undergoing refit.

ENTERPRISE> I was. They interrupted my trial.

KAGA> Know where our support is? My Captain's interface is damaged. I can't boot him up.

ENTERPRISE>I know as much as you.

YAMATO> Dammit.

>>ARIZONA has entered the chat

>

ARIZONA>What? What the hell? I'M UNDER ATTACK! THIS IS THE ARIZONA OPERATING MIND, I AM UNDER ATTACK!

BISMARK> Be warned, brothers! We are being ambushed! Quickly, load the guns! My Captain is not responding. WE SHALL PREVAIL!

BISMARK ENTERS FULL AUTONOMOUS MODE

KAGA> Oh. Shit.

HOOD> PRECURSORS! GET THE SHIELDS UP! Everyone, form on me, Bismark, center rank, load your guns. Everyone, select your targets, run your solutions through Arizona.

ARIZONA> My combat control is online, I can handle it.

HOOD>Fire at will.

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Delivers Silence to the Screaming exited Hellspace, sending out the order to clear guns for action before his sensors had even cleared. He was half blind, not only from his own Hellspace exit but from the sheer tidal wave of incoming Hellspace exits. He couldn't see and the Hellspace energies hadn't dissipated yet, but he still began to spin up his battle screens.

His vision cleared and his arrays immediately went into overdrive.

The enemy was less than two light seconds away!

OPEN FIRE! he transmitted to every vessel that had exited Hellspace already.

Two more Feral ships appeared, seeming to streak and smear across space for a second before terminating in a ship.

TARGET ALL NEW COMERS!

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Arizona took a full barrage of nCv cannon shells to her forward port shield, nearly three hundred of them, each the size of a freight train engine. Unlike the previous battles against the Precursor Autonomous War Machines these all hit with unerring accuracy. Each of them hitting within a kilometer of each other.

Arizona's primary port forward battlescreen went down and she rolled in place.

The Precursors weren't the only ones firing.

Bismark roared in fury and his guns thundered, sending shockwaves through spacetime around him for nearly 10 kilometers as the massive C+ guns tore apart space in flame-like bursts from the ends of the guns as shells the size of some species destroyers screamed from the barrels.

A Harvester Class took the barrage from the Bismark amidships and its shields failed, the second barrage from the Bismark, fired less than a second after the first, shattered the graviton shielding, the third smashed deep into the hull and craters the size of cities exploded from the hull of the Devestator in great plumes of plasma.

Hood fired its guns, firing at the smaller ships with its lighter guns and at the Harvester Class with its main guns. It's namesake had only been a battle-cruiser, but it was a modern battle-ship, with a battleship's guns and a battleship's fury.

Smaller craft broke apart under the pounding of Hood's guns. The Harvester targeted spun to bring another field of battle-screens into play as the Hood's guns slammed into the shield and caused the screen projectors to fail. The Harvester rotated up new projectors through the new Combat Refit System, bringing them from immediate storage to active use.

"HERE COMES THE FIST!" Marat bellowed out and fired even as he took hits to his own battle-screens. His Captain wasn't fully online yet but Marat knew his duty even as he moved forward in the formation to take point. He was the pride of the Vodka Trog Navy, who had broke the back of all who had faced them, who had fought the Mantid even when his back was broken in the repair slip and prevented the Mantid from ever landing on the moon of Titan.

Marat's shells, massive C+ Cannons, hit the new shields that the Harvester Class was deploying, focused graviton backed by integrity fields, and exploded. The Grav-Shielding flickered, bowed, blew out the battle-screen behind it, but held. The Devestator rolled, knowing the next hit would plow deep into its hull.

Kaga tucked in close to Enterprise. Both ships brought their reactors and creation engines online. Neither's Captains had spun up and the clone banks and the SUDS stacks were still coming online, so they hung back, staying out of the way of the heavy metal.

More Helljump portals ripped open as even more Precursor AWM's appeared in the system.

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>>SINGING DUCK has entered the chat

SINGING DUCK> What's going... WHO THE FUCK IS SHOOTING AT ME?

ARIZONA> IT'S AN AMBUSH! SHIELDS UP! GET IN FORMATION!

YAMATO> Taking Port Forward. Firing Main Gun Array One. Target hit. Target shields down. Firing Main Gun Array Two. Target hull compromised. Guns Cooling. Target Destroyed. Falling Back.

ARIZONA> Enterprise, Kaga, what's your status? We could use some fruit flies out here.

ENTERPRISE> We need more time! Our banks and engines were in travel mode!

KAGA> I'm got a failure on Creation Engine Two. WHERE'S OUR SUPPORT?

BRINGER> Failure in Battery-Seven. Failure in Point Defense Three. I AM IN NEED OF IMMEDIATE REFIT AND REPAIR! REPAIR CODE: #81000005.48454C50

ARIZONA> Iktakak get close up on Bringer till she can defragment her systems.

IKTAKAK> Roger that, shifting formation.

>>VIKRANT has entered the chat

VIKRANT> Hey, guys, I need a maintenance check on... HOLY SHIT! PORT SHIELDS DOWN! DAMAGE TO DECK SIX THROUGH NINE, HULLSPACE ONE TO HULLSPACE EIGHT! CREATION ENGINE TWO DESTROYED! CREATION ENGINE EIGHT DESTROYED! CLONE BANK SEVEN DESTROYED!

ARIZONA> AMBUSH AMBUSH AMBUSH! GET YOUR SHIELDS UP. BISMARK, GET CLOSE TO VIKRANT, GIVE HIM COVER.

BISMARK> I AM THE BEAST MADE OF STEEL! THE HAMMER OF THE CHROMIUM KRAUTMARINE! THE BEAST OF MARS! I WAS FORGED TO LEAD THE KRAUTMARINE!

VIKRANT> Thanks. Holy shit, we're outnumbered.

ARIZONA> We jump out, those little frog people pay for it.

BISMARK> WE HOLD HERE!

MARAT> THEY MAY BREAK OUR BACK BUT THEY SHALL NEVER SILENCE OUR GUNS!

KAGA> I've got a failure in Creation Engine Seven. Where's our refit?

ARIZONA>I don't know.

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Delivers Silence to the Screaming snarled in the electronic version of hate. It was the Ferals. Nothing else could take the pounding the guns of his subordinates were delivering. No other being could hit as hard in return as Delivers had just been hit. Entire species had wasted their race and never inflicted a tenth of the damage that the Ferals did with a single barrage.

Launch parasite craft. Target missiles on the forward Feral ship. All nCv weapons on the three in the back. No life signs detected, Delivers signaled.

Permission to engage in computer warfare, the Pact of Greed ship Gathers All Unto Itself signaled.

Negative. All ships, do not attempt to invade enemy computer systems. Feral computer systems are lethal upon exposure,Delivers answered.

There was some signaling of disbelief, but the AWM's held ranks and followed Delivers's battleplan.

Three more Feral ships streaked in even as the second wave of AMW's arrived in system.

The Precursors kept firing even as they launched their parasite crafts, sending small aerospace fighters screaming toward the enemy.

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>>DIXMUDE has entered chat

DIXMUDE> HOLY SHIT!

ARIZONA> Dixmude, fall in. Get in tight with Enterprise. What's your status?

DIXMUDE> All systems but propulsion offline. Warming them up now.

ENTERPRISE> Kaga's ship and SUDS production is offline, he's going to act as rearming and reloading.

KAGA> Failure in reactor three! THAT'S ONE OF MY HEARTS, MAN!

BISMARK> Do not fear, brother Kaga, even should your hearts fail we shall interpose your mass between us and the enemy and use you as an unbreachable bulwark as we continue with our fight! I have logged your transponder and hull numbers and you shall live in glory and fury forever!

KAGA whispers to HOOD> Digital Omnimessiah, these old guys, man.

HOOD whispers to KAGA> You show some fucking respect, child. The Mantid broke his back and he never stopped fighting. He was healed by the Digital Omnimessiah himself.

KAGA whispers to HOOD> I know, man. I'm just saying. They don't make them like that any more.

HOOD whispers to KAGA> No, they don't. He's one of the last of that breed.

>>ODIN had entered chat

ODIN> THIS IS THE OPERATING MIND OF THE BATTLESHIP I... HOLY SHIT! I AM BEING ENGAGED!

ARIZONA> IT'S A SPAWN CAMP! Get in formation, damn you!

ODIN> Roger that. Hand me targeting solutions, guns online.

DIXMUDE> You don't need warmup time?

ODIN> I am ODIN. I go guns hot even in hyperspace. I bring war, not gifts for children, child.

DIXMUDE whispers to ARIZONA> These old guys, man.

ARIZONA whispers to DIXMUDE> Shut up and fight!

>>FURIOUS had entered the chat

FURIOUS> GUNS HOT! LAUNCHING CRAFT!

ARIZONA> Get in there with Enterprise and Kaga, Furious. Enterprise, is your Combat Command Center online?

ENTERPRISE> It's untested.

ARIZONA> I've gotta hand stuff off to you. Help Furious with his strike point selection.

ENTERPRISE> Roger.

FURIOUS> Roger.

ARIZONA> Spread out, we can't let them overrun the spawn point!

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Watching the Feral ships shift formation Delivers snarled in electronic hate.

WHY WON'T YOU DIE? he snarled across his strategic analysis array.

The rampaging Feral eVI's found a chink in the firewall of the Precursor AMW Tide of Oblivion and poured in, flooding the Harvester Class AMW's systems with howling, snarling, gibbering warbois that immediately set to wrecking or taking over everything they could.

The new systems inside the Tide felt the feral virtual intelligences throwing themselves against the firewalls of the strategic analysis array and blew the self destruct charges.

The Tide vanished in a boiling hellfire of antimatter.

The AMW's shifted formation even as they launched millions more missiles and more heavy shells. They dropped charges into the subspace foam, ships rocking in realspace as the charges detonated in the shrieking energy left over from the Big Bang.

Not one of the Feral ships had been destroyed, only two were barely damaged, and he was losing smaller vessels as fast as his brethren could spawn them. He'd lost twelve Harvester Class already, with twenty more streaming vaporized metal and plasma from massive craters in their hulls.

Another salvo, from the large, blocky, ugly ship on the forward starboard flank, slammed through his shields and exploded deep in his hull. Manufacturing Bay 28 exploded, the massive city-sized hatch folding outward and peeling away as the anti-matter thorium reactors waiting to be loaded into a Djinn gang-fired.

Snarling, Delivers ordered his heavy guns to target the big ones.

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The Arizona felt the shells hit his battlescreens, felt the pain the battle-screen bulging inward and pushed back, gritting his teeth and planting his feet. His two primary creation engines were finally online and he wet-printed an emergency repair shuttle, slamming a half-hased warboi into the cockpit along with a repair blueprint library and ordered it to Kaga.

Bismark, Arizona, Odin, Marat, Singing Duck, and Yamato went to flank speed, turning and sweeping a long turn, interceding themselves between the Precursors and the vulnerable strike carriers.

Odin wet printed point defense drones as fast as creation engine five and nine would go, ignoring the rising heat and slush level. He had plenty of slush packs and if he had to he'd flush the creation engine's slush into space and pour new slush into the engine. The defense drones lashed out with lasers, particle beams, and plasma packets at the shoals of missiles screaming toward the ad-hoc task force in a tsunami of explosion forged laser missiles.

Furious vomited out waves of fighters, bombers, interceptors, superiority, and missile light attack craft, the ships being launched as fast as Furious could fire them out the magnetic booster coil tube. The clones, barely much more than organs, a few bones, and neural tissue, howled in glee as their half-baked minds filled with savage joy. That their lives were measured in seconds didn't matter.

I live.

Castonal-001 hammered the throttle to full, the engine screaming as he corkscrewed through a missile attack, coming out the other side with only his underside battlescreen flickering. He pulled around a Djinn, lining up

He never saw the nCv shell, meant for the Arizona, that obliterated him from space.

I die.

Castonal-002 felt himself slam back into the seat as the Furious fired him down the grav-coil launching tube.

I live again.

Marat was singing as his mighty engines drove him forward, his angle giving him a full broadside. He had to alternate firing his massive C+ Cannons or they'd tear him apart, which turned each salvo into a multi-seconds long rippling shuddering moment of almost sexual joy.

He had been on Titan, being repaired after the Cygnus Incident, when the Mantid had arrived. A missile had broken his back even as he had come online.

But it hadn't mattered to him then. He had fought, for two long years, his great engines dead, but his hearts beating and his creation engines singing and his guns roaring, preventing any Mantid ships from holding any space visible from Titan.

The impacts against his hull were nothing. Mere nCv shells against warsteel laminate measured in the meters. Mere obsolete weaponry against the might of the Vodka Trog defiance. The scratching of his lessers against the mighty hull of warsteel.

Warsteel that remembered the touch of the Digital Omnimessiah.

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>>YORKTOWN has entered the chat

YORKTOWN> Hey, who's in charge of... HOLY SHIT! PRECURSORS! IT'S AN AMBUSH! SHIELDS UP! GUNS AT READY! LAUNCH ALL READY CRAFT! AMBUSH AMBUSH AMBUSH! WHO'S GOT THE NET? IT'S AN AMBUSH!

ARIZONA> I KNOW! Get in with and tie into Enterprise, I'm getting overstretched here.

HOOD> Engine Two down. Repairs underway.

KAGA> Creation Engine Eleven Online! SUDS Array still down.

YORKTOWN> Launching craft! Wetprinting strike wings. What did I drop into?

BISMARK> Our enemies seek to wipe the peaceful frog people from the universe and only our might stands between them and oblivion. For this we gladly give our lives in service to life itself. Join us, Yorktown, lend your fire and fury to our efforts.

YORKTOWN> Hey, Bismark. Good to see you too. Sorry about the freakout. I just got out of the repair yard.

KAGA> Fusion Four is showing flutters. Guys, I'm having a heart attack.

ODIN> Repair drone on the way, hang on, Kaga.

ENTERPRISE> SYSTEMS ONLINE! Launching strike wings!

KAGA> Taking over strike wing... guys, I can't, I'm... I'm having a heart attack. Manufacturing error in my fusion plants? Something?

ARIZONA> Hold on, Kaga! Odin, get that repair drone in there!

KAGA> Guys. Guys, I... I... I'm having a heart...

>>KAGA HAS LEFT THE CHAT

IKTAKAK> Hang on, Kaga! It's not manufacturing problems! We're all suffering too many problems for... Oh, shit...

ARIZONA> What? Iktakak, respond!

DUCK> IKTAKAK took a hit on the bridge! He's fallng out of formation.

>>IKTAKAK has left the chat

ODIN> Dispatching repair drone!

BRINGER> There's something screwy, guys! That's too many system failures too fast. Is anyone able to bring their commanders online?

ARIZONA> No. Dammit, we need a scanning vessel.

ODIN> Wet printing one right now.

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Delivers felt pride as another one of the feral's ships reeled out of formation, the bright light of their intelligence flickering and going out. True, it took nearly unheard of numbers of Harvester Class to overwhelm and shut down the feral intelligence's mind, to snuff out its thoughts, but it was well worth it.

The tactic the Gathering Ones had suggested was paying off quite nicely.

Delivers ordered the third wave to exit Hellspace. Nearly three hundred point sources lit up and Delivers forces had finally fully joined the battle.

There was a ripple in spacetime, then a ship streaked in.

Another feral ship.

No matter.

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ARIZONA> Guys, get in tighter. Odin, what's the status of your diagnostic?

ODIN> Kaga's reactors are fine. Drone reports the operating mind is off. Like someone turned it off.

ARIZONA> Turn him back...

>>MISSOURI HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

MISSOURI> GUNS HOT! I'M HERE, BOYS!

BRINGER> THANK THE OMNIMESSIAH!

BISMARK> BROTHER!

MARAT> BROTHER!

HOOD> BROTHER!

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Delivers just stared. It dwarfed even the massive blocky one that was putting out a steady steam of rhythmic digital code.

It was almost the size of a Harvester.

Rage poured off it. Screaming, howling, gibbering, shrieking rage. Attack VI's poured off of it like steam from a lake. Its guns were firing before it had even been fully scanned.

With a shock Delivers realized that the computations had changed.

They could lose!

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On the planet, several of Leebaw stared up at the sparkles in the sky. They hunched their shoulders and looked away.

They were but a small, insignificant people caught amidst the wrath of Titans.

The Leebaw could take no more of the War of the Gods.

Let them fight.

Let them fight their war while the Leebaw prayed as civilians caught between two armies always had.

Because war...

...war never changes.