Chapter 288

Ta'arnoo stepped out of the assault shuttle and struggled through the snow. In the thirty minutes they had been driving for the surface it had gone from a mere foot or two of snow to waist deep. His armor immediately began to ping environmental warnings at him.

It was nearly sixty below zero before one took into account the howling wind that was moving at almost forty miles an hour, faster than a civilian car was allowed to move. The snow whipped around him, fouling the sensors, and the air was so cold that infrared and UV was useless. The snow caused beacons to fuzz, meaning he almost walked by the tactical operations center. If it hadn't been for the fact he walked face first into a guard wearing powered assist armor he would have kept right on walking. As it was, he pushed his way into the shelter and walked into an argument.

"...calm and sunny nine hours ago!" a Lanaktallan Ta'arnoo didn't recognize yelled.

"It's a Hellworld! Why didn't anyone know these blasted lemurs came from a Hellworld?" another bellowed at a cringing subordinate.

"We're all going to die here because you dropped us into a storm so terrible we don't even have words for it," still another yelled.

"My men can't find if the lubricants in their tanks keep freezing up!" still another.

"The air is so cold my mechs are suffering damage on the air intakes for the coolant system!" still another.

One turned and pointed at Ta'arnoo. "Oh, look, it's the Great Most High of Military Intelligence, here to tell us all about how his data says its summer so it can't possibly be snowing!"

Ta'arnoo shook his head. "The Terrans are using weather control systems to cause this weather. They call it a blizzard and in the winter its fairly common."

"So they know how to fight in it," one of the Most Highs said. He spit his chewed cud on Ta'anoo's feet. "My amazement at the Intelligence Services knows no bounds."

"Sapient life doesn't come from Hellworlds!" Ta'arnoo yelled back, kicking the cud back at the Most High. "Feral, primitive intelligence, yes, but sapients? No!"

"At least, so far, we aren't being engaged by the enemy," the Great Most High of Armor said.

"We are being engaged," Ta'arnoo snapped back. "They caused this storm, they wanted this storm across the entire middle of the continent."

Another Most High looked up. "Jamming is fierce and comprehensive. Anyone further than fifty miles or so is out of contact. A lot of units are not responding."

"If they're out of contact for longer than two hours, assume they have been destroyed," Ta'arnoo said. His tendrils curled as he stamped his forehooves a few times to ease off agitation. "The Terran defenses are a magnitude stronger than even our worst case estimates."

"They even use the weather as a weapon. Will these crazed lemurs refuse to stoop to any level?" the Most High of Infantry asked.

"You realize what we're here to do, right?" The Most High of Mechs asked, reaching up and rubbing his face. He had been complaining of headaches for almost three months.

"To defeat their ground forces so we can have our ships burn their worlds," the Most High of Armor snapped.

"Then why should they not stoop to any level to ensure victory? Even insane lemurs like the Terrans know what happens if they lose," the Most High of Mechs said. He rubbed his face again. "We'll planet crack every rock in this system and they'll be dead. Why shouldn't they weaponize everything in reach? The Great Herd would."

"Don't they know our victory is inevitable? It would be much less painless if they just accepted the fact that the Great Herd will eliminate them from the galaxy. All they are doing is prolonging the agony until our inevitable victory," the Aerospace Most High harumphed.

"You talk a lot for a male with no assets," the Mechanized Infantry Most High sneered. "I'd be more impressed with your words if you had a single surviving aerospace fighter."

"HOW DARE YOU!" the Aerospace Most High screamed.

"How dare he what? Tell the truth?" the Armored Infantry Most High asked, whirling around and clenching his rifle with all four hands. His power armor whined, the joints clicking.

"I can only hope you face the lemurs with the same ferocity and aggression you display at one another," Ta'arnoo said. "Because, mark my words down in keep them close, the Terrans are coming. The blizzard is just the first wave of their attacks."

The Aerospace Most High sneered again. "And what if they do? Our might will crush them."

"Says the male with nobody but himself," the Armored Infantry Most High snickered.

"YOU TAKE THAT BACK!" the Aerospace Most High screeched.

"ENOUGH!" the Great Most High of the attack force stood up from where he'd been sitting in the shadows, surrounded by technicians who were busy setting up equipment that would enable the Most Highs to command their troops.

Ta'arnoo could tell that everyone had forgotten he was there as the big male clattered out into the middle of everyone.

"The weather is a weapon, then," he turned to the Maintenance Most High. "Find out the status of our weapons, our armor, our equipment, our defenses. See how much this weather is effecting us."

The Maintenance Most High saluted and left the hastily assembled shelter, snow and wind blowing in for a moment and dropping the temperature to below zero almost instantly.

The heater against the wall started to whine and sputter.

The Great Most High turned to Ta'arnoo. "How long do we have until the lemurs attack?"

Ta'arnoo shrugged. "According to our data passed by our spy we're in the middle of somewhere called the Vodkatrog Empire," he tapped his dataslate and looked over the data. "This region is relatively uninhabited once it recovered from the Mantid Glassing. Mostly tribes of what our spy termed 'techno-nomads' and primitives."

"Hmmm. How much force would these techno-nomads be able to bring to bear?" The Great Most High asked.

Ta'arnoo gave his race's equivalent of a shrug again. "Unknown. Apparently they fight among themselves quite a bit for territory and resources so it's doubtful they'd be able to put up a coordinated defense or offense against us, which means they will be easily defeated."

The Great Most High nodded. "And our ships in orbit?" he turned to the Most High in command of the dropships. "How did our ships in orbit fare?"

The Most High looked up from where he was sitting down, staring at his hand. "What ships?" he asked.

"Our ships in orbit. The ones with the planet crackers, our reinforcements, and our orbital support," the Great Most High repeated.

The Most High looked up. "Gone. A quarter of our forces never made it off the ships before they were destroyed. We have no resupply in orbit, Terran Orbital Defense took down our entire task force."

"Can we get support from another Task Force waiting in orbit," the Great Most High asked.

The Most High of Orbital Operations shook his great head. "There are no ships in orbit that last longer than a few minutes. Most don't even get within the orbit of the planet's overly large satellite. It's like every square inch of the planet is covered in orbital defense systems."

The Great Most High just stared in shock. "None of them? What about the Domination Class Super-Dreadnoughts? There were over a hundred in our Task Force alone?"

"Half of them broke up or exploded with all hands before we even made orbit. The rest were destroyed by the guns on the surface of the planet and the satellite as we disembarked," the Orbital Most High said, staring at the floor again. "Those damnable guns of theirs."

"What about the Leviathan classes? We had almost thirty of them?" another Most High asked.

"Blown out of orbit. A few lasted a little longer, but they were under attack by the same Terran aerospace assets that took out the Most High's entire force," the Orbital Operations Most High said. He slowly took a wad of nutricud out of his pouch and put it in his mouth. "Some of the Leviathans didn't even get a chance to launch their drop ships."

Ta'arnoo just nodded, bringing up a window on his datapad and looking at the time-stamps for when the various ships had gone offline and when dropships had launched.

"Less than half of the entire task force survived to even get in range of launching dropships. Before we were halfway to the target the last transponder went offline," Ta'arnoo said. "The Most High is correct. Less than a quarter of our force survived to this landing zone. The other Task Forces either suffered the same fate or landed with less than a tenth or were destroyed in orbit."

The Great Most High's hands shook and he stamped his hooves for a moment to get himself back under control. "How? How were they able to destroy Leviathans with just a handful of shots from their guns?"

"Because a single salvo from one of the lunar batteries is capable of destroying a super-dreadnought, and a half-salvo from Terran groundside orbital defense batteries could do the same," Ta'arnoo said, looking at the data. "It's not just their kinetic weapons, not just their standard laser warhead missiles, they've got munitions that go far beyond what we're capable of."

"Like what? Big rocks?" the Aerospace Most High sneered.

"Like this," Ta'arnoo swiped on the datapad, throwing the image taken from one of the dropships external cameras up onto the large dataslate against the wall.

The big Leviathan class ship's shields were blazing brightly, almost hiding the ship itself as more missiles came howling in on it.

"This is from the initial salvo," Ta'arnoo said. He used his finger to run the pointer. "At this time the Fury of the Unstoppable Herd has been engaged for less than a half second. I'm slowing down time at a 50:1 scale so you can understand what is happening.

The shields flared brightly again.

"That's a hit from one of those weapons they call a 'C+ Cannon', which uses the kinetic mass increase due to speed to make a twenty ton slug of raw iron into something weighing approximately a thousand times the original mass in kinetic mass," Tra'anoo said. "We're not sure how it works but the Executor Intelligence Agency said that the new shielding would stop the rounds. They did, for..."

He pointed right as the shields on the massive ship dropped, revealing its awesome lines. It was almost fifty miles long, ten miles wide, and a mile thick.

"Half the barrage," Ta'arnoo said. Massive craters started dimpling the Leviathan's armor and plumed of vaporized alloys started bursting from the craters. "There's the rest of the barrage. This was the first barrage fired at the Fury of the Unstoppable Herd, which has never been beaten in over twelve million years."

"So the Executor's vaunted shielding failed," the Aerospace Most High sneered, grasping at anything to make himself look better.

"Any other shielding would have been ineffective, the rounds passing straight through it and detonating inside the hull, like they did with the Corporate Fleet," Ta'arnoo said. He highlighted a volley of missiles. "These missiles, with the shield down, drove in for the kill."

"There's only a few dozen missiles," the Aerospace Most High said, frowning. "How could only a few dozen kill the Fury?"

"Because each missile represents a hundred," Ta'arnoo said.

On the screen the missile began to sparkle.

"They're firing off their laser heads pretty far out," the Air Defense Most High mused.

"They aren't firing off laser heads. Terran missile systems are particularly aggrevating," Ta'arnoo said. He zoomed in on what looked like a long tube with two boxes, one on each side, tacked on. As everyone watched the boxes fired off 280 missiles each, then the tube vanished.

"What happened?" the Armor Most High asked.

"Once it fires its submunitions, and this is one missile, the main body of the missile uses a graviton driver to yank itself into the grav field, from the back, accelerating forward, into a hypervelocity nCv round," Ta'arnoo said.

The display followed the missile in, which came in fast and spiraling, dodging point defense systems. Ta'arnoo looked around and could see that the majority of Most Highs were sneering at the tiny missiles.

The fired and Ta'arnoo froze the image.

"Each of those beams is a only a meter wide, they're firing directly into and around the impact point of the nCv round," Ta'arnoo stated. "Now, look at the damage."

The beams just seemed to core out holes straight into the ship, sending up clouds of particles.

"What was that?" the Great Most High asked as the screen pulled back to show the Fury starting to break apart.

"As near as any systems can tell, it changes the charges on atomic forces, making static electrical charges attractive and nuclear attraction force repelling, it makes the atoms just come apart, but you haven't seen the rest," Ta'anoo hit play.

"In comes the rest of the missile," Ta'arnoo said, highlighting what should have either been destroyed by the firing of the beams or been nothing but dead junk. Instead it immediately pulsed and vanished. "That's a pulse of some type of energy we don't really understand. It disrupts sensors," the screen went white. "That's the Fury exploding."

There was silence as Ta'arnoo ended the video.

"And that, Great Most High, is why we have exactly zero orbital assets," he finished.

"And the other Task Forces?" the Great Most High asked.

"Those that made it of the ships took heavy casualties making planetfall, over forty-percent were wiped out completely. We're the strongest, and we have slightly less than a third of our forces, no aerospace assets, limited artillery, and no ammunition beyond what was carried," Ta'arnoo said.

"And what is the opinion of Military Intelligence regarding our efforts here to destroy the planetary shield generator?" the Great Most High asked.

Ta'arnoo said something that he had never thought, in all of his three hundred years of life, that he'd ever say.

"We have no chance. The only question is a simple one," Ta'arnoo said.

"And what is that?" The Aerospace Most High sneered.

"How long it takes the Terrans to kill us."

-----------------------

Inside the Oort Cloud, when the Corporate Fleet dropped in, ancient subspace beacons, running on a forgotten and lost channel, stirred to life. They were clustered with ice and particle debris from the thousands of years of drifting through the cloud, using gravitatic anchors to stay in roughly the same position. They were completely indetectable unless someone knew the exact band to look upon.

A band that had been abandoned long ago.

The Corporate Fleet oriented on their targets, the different planets of the Sol System, and began sweeping down through empty space toward their targets, light seconds or even minutes between the planetary bodies. They were convinced that there could be no resistance, no unified defense.

They were wrong.

From out of the Oort Cloud was coming massive volleys of firepower. Missiles, C+ Cannons, singularity cannons, large bore maser cannons capable of frying a small moon, shoals of screaming drones, subspace resonance cannon shot, even superstring compressor cannon rounds normally fired by planetary batteries.

When the Corporate Fleet had been driving in-system, something out in the Oort Cloud had been hammering them. The drones raking the rear of the fleet, the compressor cannons blowing thirty mile wide channels of obliteration through the rear of the fleet, the missiles hammering the rear ranks by the tens of thousands.

Each group would see the fire happen and by the time the munitions reached them, with the exception of the five volleys of hundreds of C+ cannon shells, another fleet, light seconds or minutes away, was being engaged.

Kibuka was connected to his massive ship. The hull constructed entirely out of atomic bonded Losslglass, the mass tanks were still full to the brim of H3 slush taken from worlds glassed by the Mantid. He was aware of every last rivet and screw and strut in his massive ship, aware of every weapon he fired, he was every drone, his brain connected to them by arcane methods created just for him and forgotten when the technicians and scientists had died in a fury of plasma fire when a novabomb went off and wiped away the research and construction facility.

The forward third of his hull was thinly coated with the Lossglass of that facility's death.

Inside the great ship his body, ravaged by being hooked up to machines in a stasis tank and left looking like an ancient dessicated corpse, was far away and gave no clue to what filled the Immortal.

Rage.

Every ship he saw that was not Terran he hated furiously. His hate consuming him, his rage fueling the strange matter creation engines and power plants of his great ship, his wrath manifesting in flickering purple battle-screens thicker than some ships were long.

He would pump his hate into the universe, weapons roaring in the silence of space, glittering and gleaming as they reached out for a hated enemy.

They were hated for merely existing.

Kibuka could feel the empty spot inside him where once his brothers had been as he made microjumps to different parts of the Oort Cloud, to get behind the enemy forces, and fire his weapons.

Again. And again. And again.

When the Military Fleet made its drop, Kibuka had been reduced to using his extreme range firepower, and the new targets were a welcome victim to his all consuming rage. He jumped to behind the thickest of the attackers, the fleet he knew would attack Lost Terra.

He waited, letting his guns cool, his creation engines deslush, his stealth systems realign. He deployed drones by the thousand, his fragmented mind linking with all of them.

He was not like his brother, not like his fellow Immortal. Legion was all of himself. Kibuka was linked to every weapon like a true warrior should. Alike, but fundementally different.

The lead elements of the Military Fleet began moving inward, toward their targets.

Left behind were massive ships that had only a slight percentage of the Military Fleet stay behind. They were the size of the capital class of the enemy, but Kibuka's sensor did not see the massive amount of weapons the capital ships would carry.

Kibuka's dead but alive mouth twisted in a sneer. A command and control ship should always appear identical to the combat ships otherwise the enemy could pick them out of formation.

His senses twitched, he flexed muscles he didn't have, he moved limbs that had never existed.

From out of the Oort Cloud screamed thousands of drones, shoals of missiles, and heavy weapon battery shots.

The Lanaktallan Military Fleet's Command and Control Grand Rear Most Highs began dying.

Kibuka didn't care about their fate.

He infused every shot, every missile, every beam, with his hate.

I just wanted to be left alone, to sleep a dreamless deathless sleep.

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The black ships of the Antaeus Fleet made the exit from Deadspace to Realspace with a roar. Realspace bulging, twisting, and finally tearing to allow the skull prowed ships of the entire Antaeus Fleet to be bloodily birthed into the realspace in the Sol System.

They had traveled for long enough that every ships sported a thick layer of deadmatter, that the prows were nothing more than screaming Terran skulls with flames in the eyes and jaws.

Bellona reached out with her senses even as she lifted up her baton. She stood on the airless show bridge of her great ship, the first and the most might, the Gloire, built in the foundries of Hateful Mars.

The Gloire had been the first ship who's entire hull and superstructure had been made entirely from warsteel. She had everything but a crew when the Mantid had attacked. In order to keep the Mantid from repurposing her, the engineers, as their last act of defiance, had destroyed the computer linkages and command/control runs near the bridge.

They had cut Gloire's throat even as the Mantid raced toward the ship.

Bellona could remember both of her rebirths. Once as Bellona the Undying Beauty, servant and apostle to the Digital Omnimessiah.

Again as an Immortal, bound to the Gloire and her dark refitting facility in place where even death had died.

She watched as one by one her children joined the Fleet Gestalt Chat.

The Missouri was last, coming through a few seconds after Steamboat Willy, her newest daughter. By the time Willy got clear of deadspace, Bellona had absorbed and analyzed the data directly around her fleet and flung out her will to her defiant children.

"OPEN FIRE!" Bellona screamed out, lowering her baton! Her skirt swirled in the vacuum of the show-bridge and her hair drifted around her.

The guns of the Black Fleet opened up on the remains of the Corporate Fleet that had been driving hard toward a refinery complex in the asteroid belt. The Black Fleet had exited right into the middle of the fleet, the mass displacement turning the Corporate Fleet vessels into little more than subatomic fog by the violence of their reentry to realspace.

Bellona could see another fleet coming with her blinded eyes and sent the warning to TerraSol System Defense even as she ordered her children to finish off the stragglers and set course for 'down' and 'outward' from Sol itself.

She ordered the guns to fire on ships she could see that had not arrived. Her children didn't question, their crews loyal and faithful.

All of the crews were at 100%. Half of her children were running with Kentai Captains, but that was fine. Plenty of psychic circuitry had been damaged in the fight with the dark ones, many templates had been damaged in the fight with the Precursor AWM's and then the new species, so running in 'safe mode' was fine with Bellona.

In the below decks of the Bismarck dozens of teenage girls loaded guns by hand, sweating as they passed the shells by hand, the multi-ton shells being passed between the girls that looked too weak to pick up a heavy book. In the gunnery stations they clenched their teeth and fired, ignoring the return fire that hammered at the shields of the great warship.

On the deck the Kentai Captain stared with eyes full of hate.

Behind her was her birthplace, TerraSol. A small part of her keel had been taken from the wreckage of the original ship from where it had lain at the bottom of a great ocean in dark and silence for centuries.

She reached out and touched her master control panel, running her fingers across it even as the great dark engines of the Bismarck drove them forward toward the newly arrived enemies.

WE ARE THE UNYIELDING HAMMER OF TERRA! VICTORY OR DEATH! Bismarck roared across the channels.

EITHER IS FINE! the rest of the Black Fleet roared in agreement.

---------------------

Legion moved his fleet to intercept the next wave, spreading out in a classic bull's head, the 'horns' of the formation made up of his faster missile wagons, the 'skull' of the formation made up of his heavy ships with their massive guns.

He didn't need the computers to formulate strategy and pass on his orders. Instead they were dedicated to analysis of the enemy's attack patterns and defensive systems.

His fast-cloning tanks and his creation engines finished replacing the torchship interceptors he'd lost as well as the fast attack bombers and he ordered them launched once each cleared preliminary checks.

He faintly heard Bellona's shrieking battlecry, he could feel Kibuka's wrath and hate emanating from the entire Oort cloud, and felt his blood run cold.

Legion knew it was going to happen.

He didn't want to hear it.

But he knew he would.

I JUST WANT LEFT ALONE!