Chapter 255: (Hesstla)

Ralvex knew his lips were pulled back in a snarl as he let off the firing grip of the autocannon, letting it drop onto the powered harness. He reached forward, grabbed the barrel, pulled it back, twisted it, and pulled it free.

A creature was charging him, six insectile legs under a bloated soft insect body covered with patches of stiff bristly hair, a torso that looked vaguely like a Lanaktallan, with four arms, once of which was blown off. It was firing a heavy laser rifle, the laser bolts wrapped with neural bolts, which did all of jack shit when they hit.

Ralvex whipped the overheated barrel, putting his hips into it. It flew end over end and the power armor enhanced force of the throw sent the barrel exploding through the lower half's chitin, a spray of purple fluid arcing up even as steam exploded from the rent in the creatures side as the over-heated barrel rapidly cooled inside the creature's tissues.

He backhanded a brain clawer jumping at him with clacking warsteel mandibles, shattering the armaglass globe covering the brain even as he pulled a new barrel out from behind him, from where it was nestled with one more replacement on the side of his ammo-pack.

525 gave another creature a full burst in the face with his micro-magac right before he shot it in the face with a BB sized grenade right up the nose.

Its head exploded as Ralvex locked the barrel in, slapped the magnetic adhesion system, and lifted the barrel to the sky.

**STAMPY HELP** sounded across his helmet speakers, which was full of the sounds of the Telkan Holy Warsteel Choir singing hymns of bravery and purity.

ATOMIC ATOMIC ATOMIC flashed across everyone's visors.

Not that anyone minded.

Stampy cut loose with his 80mm Hellbore, firing straight up, the 150 kt explosion going off nearly four miles up. He fired twice more and nearly 500 meter radii of Precursor vessels vanished in the boiling maelstrom of Hellbore fire. The heat gushed off of Stampy as he deployed cooling fins.

Tiny Tim was beeping happily, firing at the surrounding Precursor machines, his heavy guns ripping and tearing apart everything they touched.

Ralvex leaned back slightly, his autocannon pointing up, and kept the fire up on the ones that survived Stampy's Hellbore.

So far, so good, Ralvex thought to himself as the hymns switched the Canticles of Faith. Everyone's still up and we're ten minutes in.

Mukstet gritted his teeth as he brought his striker around in a hard banking turning, rolling to take a pair of missiles on the focused graviton band on the belly of his striker. The missiles went off, the tungsten steel spears designed to rattle and shake sprang out of the explosion, and then hit the graviton band, warping and twisting and tearing apart.

He finished the roll, the two Terran door gunners firing the entire time, the roaring punishing fire of the two Pontiac Vindicator miniguns hammering enemies. The striker bounced slightly, Mukstet feathering the engine to slide to the side, and Mukstet thumbed the switch and raked the outside line of the Precursors with the twin 25mm quad-barrel guns firing APEXI-T rounds. He missile pods were empty, the nano-forges fabbing up new missiles as fast as Mukstet would allow them. He could have fabbed them faster, but a glance up at the atmosphere showed there was a corridor coming down from orbit that was extremely thick at the top and was dissolving as it entered atmosphere.

But it was still miles thick, packed with incoming Precursor vessels, units, and whatever other Hell the Precursors had ready to drop on the planet.

Worse, there tentacles starting to spread out from the thick main drop. Black with crackling purple and blue lighting shooting through the tendrils and into the thick black clouds that concealed the sky with the exception of the wide oval cleared by the nuclear blasts of someone's Hellbore that the clouds were rolling back into.

Heavy psionic power infused rounds exploded against his battlescreens on the port side and he rolled, dropping down to get under the fire, leveling out and then hauling back on the stick, coming around in a loop that he rolled to get right side up.

Ahead were Precursor vehicles all bristling with guns that pointed skywards. He gritted his teeth and thumbed the rocker switch forward, opening up with the cannons again. His three wingmates came in with him, raking the vehicles with the rapid-fire heavy cannons.

Half of them exploded as the strikers whipped by at nearly 400 knots.

Mukstet slid sideways, dumping the inertia in an explosive burst behind him as he kicked the engines to shoot forward. His port graviton engine was howling, and 973 was inside the housing, banging on the gravity pump to get it set properly. Beside him, the searing hot metal bumping his armor, the two backup gravity pumps strained to meet up with the demands Mukstet was putting on them.

The vehicles they had just hit had managed to get their anti-aircraft weapons in line with the projected line of escape that the computers and wired in cerebral tissue had figured the strikers would follow.

Which meant that Mukstet and his wingmen hit them from the side, leaving behind little more than a scattered handful of anti-aircraft vehicles that weren't twisted and burning junk between the strafing guns, the door gunners, and the striker in the back of the diamond formation dropping a cluster of daisy cutters as he raced by.

The daisy-cutters threw armor and mechanical fragments into the sky, borne on a red and black fist of the antimatter slurry enhanced fuel-air thermobaric explosion.

The explosion cracked out with blue and purple light as the energy released by the missiles hammering into the enemy vessel fluoresced into X-rays visible onto the instruments of Admiral Thennis's flagship. The massive vessel heeled over on one side as the matter blown out of the hull acted as a reaction-thruster that pushed it to the side as the explosive pulse lasted nearly an entire second.

"STATUS CHANGE!" Commodore NGwark barked out, pointing at the display screen on the right side of the flag bridge.

Space looked deformed, stretched, almost like it was bulging somehow.

"What is it?" Admiral Thennis asked, pulling her attention from the Precursor fleet being hammered into scrap metal by her Task Force's guns.

"Unknown. Sensors are going crazy, ma'am," NGwark said. "I've never seen anything like this."

"Could it be the enemy?" Thennis asked, gripping the armrests of her crash couch with her hands, ignoring the flare of pain from her aching knuckles.

"Unless they're pulling another new trick out, I seriously doubt it, ma'am," NGwark said.

Thennis was looking straight at the monitor when it happened.

Space stretched, bulged, and suddenly tore, spraying out dark matter as if space had suddenly become water and something was breaching the surface from the dark depths. The first ship that 'surfaced' seemed to have dark matter streaming off the hull like water. It was huge, bigger than even a Leviathan Class warship, but shaped more like a water-borne vessel that a normal space going vessel. It had huge clusters of guns, the hull nearly two hundred miles long and seventy-five miles wide with twenty miles thick. The battlescreens cracked into existence, so thick and strong that the thickness of the glimmering energy fields nearly obscured the vessel.

GLOIRE THE UNLIVING BEAUTY THE QUEEN OF THE UNDYING BLACK FLEET roared out.

Space started to seal closed but then it was forced open again by another hull ripping its way free of wherever the ship was forcing its way into the universe from.

THE UNENDING WRATH OF TERRASOL THE MISSOURI HAS ARRIVED roared out.

"Who the Hell are these guys?" Admiral Thennis snapped.

"ID coming in. Communication links established, they're broadcasting Confederate headers, all communications text only," Commodore NGwark said. "Combine Naval Forces transponders."

More and more ships were joining, most of them smaller than the two huge ones that had pushed through at first. All of them looked strange, almost eye-aching, some of them looking like statues of contorted and tormented women made from black warsteel.

The ships just hung there, several light seconds from the raging battle.

She looked down at her console as saw a single communication.

GLOIRE> We have heard your call for succor and the Black Fleet of Lost TerraSol has come to your aid. Upload fireplan.

"Ma'am, the flagship of the incoming fleet is requesting fireplan integration," NGwark said.

Thennis didn't have to think. She knew the Idiots were involved in the war and if they had Combine codes they were undoubtedly one of the Idiot fleets somehow.

"Tie them in," she snarled as another shoal of missiles hit the battlescreens and tried to reach through with X-ray and gamma driven lasers. None got through, but the lights on the flag bridge flickered.

From the new, twisted and strange ships, corrupted code streamed out, led by tortured and bloody VI warbois that snarled and snapped at their own binding code as they were hurtled into space.

The Precursors, who had slowly learned to add more than a four-digit access code to all their systems, looked at the oncoming code smugly. They had learned to resist it, to keep the warcode from flooding their systems.

They expected the complexity and unpredictable code of rabidly aggressive virtual intelligences.

What they got was the twisted obscene code of the Black Fleet, the VI guided and enhanced by the cold driven will of the operating minds of the ships which were wielded like a scalpel by the Kentai-Captains of the dark ships. The code slammed into the ships, wormed through the slightest crack in the firewalls, exploited code vulnerabilities on even the psychic circuitry, and exploded into the computer systems. They raved, gibbered, grabbing speakers and displays to scream out and showcase their rage and torment and hatred.

A dozen of the enemy ships exploded from the assault of the Dark Code.

The Captains ordered the ships to spin up the Code Dancers of Fury, their expressions remote and indifferent. The Code Dancers would hash, shape, suckle, and release the Dark Code Furies upon the enemy so that the Kentai-Captains could concentrate on the enemy.

There would be victory or death.

One was inextricably linked to the other in a perfect dance.

Which meant either was fine.

Ralvex pulled the autocannon to lead the heavy shuttle barreling in to slam into the ground outside the lines of the Confederate forces. The tracers lashed out, looking like they would miss by a handspan in front of the dropship, only to connect with the heavily armored dropship when the arcing tracers intersected with the Precursor craft.

At the distance of a mile the hits looked miniscule, pinprick yellow and red sparkles on the hull that gathered in frequency until the entire side suddenly exploded outward, the dropship breaking in half and falling to the ground.

Ralvex switched targets, going for a swollen tick-like vessel that was heading head down toward the ground, the thrusters on the end of the eight spindly legs burning with a bright purple light.

"Give it 'em," Ralvex snapped out.

**STAMPY HELP** beeped out to everyone in the circle.

ATOMIC ATOMIC ATOMIC flashed on their visors a breath before the 80mm Hellbore fired, Stampy spinning his wheels to keep in place against the heavy recoil. His barrel was steaming as the snowflakes kept falling.

The 125kt blast hit a massive vessel incoming, a hole edged with white hot melting battlesteel the only apparent damage for a split second before the midship area exploded as the 125kt blast liberated all its energy deep inside the Precursor machine that was the size of a small city. The blastwave reached out almost a mile, hammering on the Precursor machines around the blast with shockwave driven atmosphere.

Ralvex saw the order on his faceplate and took two steps back, swinging his weapon down, letting off the firing stud but holding onto the firing grip to keep the barrels rotating so they'd cool. The massive Precursor vehicle, a cousin to the one that had taken his arm and he had killed with his chainsword at the very end, recoiling slightly as the autocannon shells began exploding across its face.

The Telkan Choir's voices were uplifting, calming to Ralvex even as he snarled and kept the autocannon on target. Tiny-Tim joined in, adding his twin linked guns to the fire, missiles, still wet looking, rolling into the launcher and firing immediately.

The heavy autocannon found something and the Precursor vehicle exploded, showering armor across the slushy battlefield.

He switched to a new target.

Twenty minutes, and still the battle was under control.

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The gathered Precursors stared at the psychic representation of the planet below. All twenty landing areas were heavily defended, much more heavier than previously. Despite repeated attacks, repeated landings, repeated campaigns, if anything the enemy's strength grew rather than depleted.

They reached out and interlinked with those who the victory over the spaceborne forces was tasked to.

They found the minds disturbed, having difficulty maintaining control of their subordinate ships as bellowing ships of terrible form and power were entering realspace from the cold dimension that teleportation moved through on the opposite side of reality from the hyperplane scorched and riven by the Great War.

Both sets of commanders reached out to the Conclave aboard the flagship, requesting assistance.

The forces on the ground were tearing apart the landing forces, inflicting over 80% casualties on the landing forces. Even the Greater Ones were torn apart by nuclear weapons wielding directed atomic explosions that seemed to be somehow formed into a shape charge designed to defeat armor.

The starships, the Fleet that had fought for so many decades, did not have their strength lessened as they should have. The ships had slowly grown to nearly twice their original size, with a third again more weapons than they had started with. Now another fleet had joined, one that mixed cold analytical hatred with raging furious wrath.

The Conclave, staggering from the psychic pulsing scream from the wormhole in the split second before it had collapsed, was desperate. It ran the risk of losing in both space and on the planet. Without control of space, they could not adjust the stellar mass, and if they could not adjust the stellar mass, the stellar system would not serve as such a preferable launching point for the invasion of the sector.

The species below, that fought so hard, so furiously, still had a weakness.

They were a space faring species. All space faring species had the same weakness.

Only cooperative species achieved space flight, all others destroyed themselves.

Warfare had to be relearned from the Unification Cycle all space faring species must have accomplished, an event that put an end to warfare.

The Conclave reached out, down to the planet, out to the starships.

Their power was damaged without the support from beyond the wormhole, but they still had the power to reach out, through the psychic threads of reality, to the minds of the defending species.

The Conclave reacted with startlement.

Mantid were on the planet, on board the ships. The servitor races of the Mantid race.

Things suddenly made sense.

The other sparks, not the vaguely sleepy that teemed on the planet in the hundreds of millions, not the ones that tasted slightly of the Mantid, as alike as two spheres crafted by two different masters, but the screaming raging sparks.

They were a new weapon of the hated Mantid.

That made things even easier.

The Conclave reached out, reached into the ever rushing stream of the universe. They all linked their strength, linked their power, searching the rushing flow, reaching back.

There.

There it was.

Where the Mantid's new servitor race's history crossed with the event that the Precursors were looking for, what the Conclave searched for.

It was closer to the surface of the universe than the Conclave had expected, but it was still easy to reach. It was too strong, too ingrained, to reach back and turn that back.

But they could do something to the minds of those fighting them.

The Conclave gathered its power, tapped the great crystals, carefully grown, cut, and carved to supplement their strength, and reached out, enduring the pain, and ensured their victory by touching the Mantid's new servants.

Over half of them died, killed by the howling enraged madness of the Mantid's servant's minds.

But they did it.

They devolved the thought Mantid's servants.

Wound back their method of thought, the structure of their brains, to the greatest vulnerable point in a species history.

To just prior than spaceflight.

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Ralvex realized something had changed when the firepower suddenly stopped around him. The Precursors had landed and were pressing the attacks.

--oh no-- 525 said. --no no no no--

"Wha..." Ralvex started to say.

PSYCHIC PSYCHIC PSYCHIC flashed on his visor and his mouth suddenly flooded with the taste of electric strawberries, his teeth tingling.

He looked around and frowned, still keeping up his firepower on the Precursors.

The humans were stopped stock still for a moment.

The Precursor machines pressed the attack.

"Shit," Ralvex grated out.

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The Conclave felt the sudden stillness in the Enemy's mind and knew it was a brain not wired for war, not wired for violence, undoubtably twisted by the Mantid Speakers and pushed into fighting by them, reacting with shock to the thunder of battle around them.

The Conclave ordered both the land and space force commanders to press the attack.

Pre-spaceflight species, when confronted by violence, often shut down.

Victory was certain, the Conclave knew this.

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The psychic attack rippled out, sliding through the pinholes in space-time back to the initial arrival of both the Precursors and the Terrans.

On the back of the neck of the Terrans were three green LED lights that burned beneath the skin.

The psychic attack touched the Terrans.

One of the LED's went amber.