Chapter 291

The Lanaktallan forces that attacked the other worlds expected their attacks to succeed merely because they launched them. They barely took in any account of their targets fighting back or having any skill at fighting back.

Most of them, from Corporate to Executor, had experience putting down attempted neo-sapient rebellions, some of them even on Leebaw. They had experience in crowd control, suppression, and occupation against an unarmed enemy.

Their neural templates were full of victory after victory after victory. How to turn situations experienced by War Stallions (gone tens of millions of years) from possible defeat to total victory through the sheer weight of the Great Herd.

Long ago it had been determined that loading up memories of how to deal with defeat only put the thought of defeat into the minds of the Lanaktallan who had taken the place of the War Stallions. When new ones were added, they added merely victories, not examples of strategy and tactics, not examples of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, only example after example of victory, each victory getting easier as templating heavy fighting might give the Lanaktallan troops the idea that the enemy could fight back.

Cargo Cultist work at its finest.

With Victory Disease stirred in.

At Smokey Cone they came loaded up with Precursor War neural templates normally used for additional training for War Stallions, as an addition to field training, weapons training, a harsh training cycle that only produced the best of the best.

It was loaded into Lanaktallan who had done nothing but fight against those weaker than them to the point that most of the attempted insurrections didn't even have weapons.

Worse, their brains weren't the same as War Stallions, so the overlays didn't take right.

They dropped into Smokey Cone with the idea that it would be fighting Mantid wave tactics that sought to get in close. Mantid ships preferred to get in close where they could merge their hivemind with tactical computers to shred their opponents.

After all, the Treana'ad looked kind of like Mantids (wrong coloring, different shaped head, different style footpads, their abdomens were armored) which meant they should fight like Mantids.

Their strategy also completely neglected to take into account the fact that the Treana'ad were part of a larger organization.

The largest organization the Lanaktallan had fought was a twelve system/three race rough cooperative nearly eighty-million years ago.

The Treana'ad were part of the Terran Confederacy.

And all that implies.

So the Lanaktallan dropped in at the resonance zone of Smokey Cone and drove for the planets, confident in their victory, their minds full of victories of the past. Around several guns were crude pictures of Terran bovines surrounded by dancing hatchlings drawn with 10 meter wide lines into the sand so that it could be seen from orbit.

It was a Treana'ad thing, it made sense to them.

On the sixth planet the siege battery looked goofy. The guns were painted bizarre colors and sat under a red giant sun. The sand was drawn in patterns, most of them faces or words, around the huge cannons. The crews all wore the bizarre outfits (to anyone else) of the Planetary Defense Force.

The temporal ranging scope spotted the ships before even the gravitics and the PDF began loading their guns at the same time the Corporate Wave dropped out of jumpspace. The Hive Queens met over hyperlink to discuss with the Senior Matrons about what this meant for the Treana'ad peoples.

The Lanaktallan had barely reconfigured their computers from jumpspace to realspace when the first C+ cannon rounds hit, firing at temporal sight locked in targets. They started moving in only to meet missiles painted in weird patterns, with white, brown, pink being the most common.

The Corporate Fleet had taken 10% casualties when the Military Fleet arrived.

The Hive Queens decided and The Bag was closed.

It had been devised during the Lagnalkak Invasion that led to the terrible war that spawned the Confederacy, and had been updated at the beginning of the Mar-gite Invasion, as a way for each stellar system to protect itself from unceasing wave attacks.

Each stellar system, like Smokey Cone, had its defenses laid out as if The Bag was closed, with no reinforcement coming for either side.

Which meant that the lovely human concept of 'Overwhelming Firepower' was gleefully adopted.

Not that it mattered to the Lanaktallan, who had lost over 50% of their Corporate Fleet and 25% of their Military Fleet by the time they realized just how badly they were screwed.

The Treana'ad had always used their two greatest advantages to good effect.

Speed and size.

A Treana'ad warrior was capable of running up to 50 mph for an hour with a full combat load, which often consisted of abdomen mounted mortars, anti-armor rockets, or air to air missiles or even just a tried and true minigun and ammo pack.

The alliance with the Terrans, through the Mantid War and everything else, meant that their military tech matched the Terrans.

Treana'ad aerospace fighters made use of the fact that Treana'ad were excellent fliers. All hatchlings could fly for the first few years of their lives. Usually just from the ground to their mother's abdomen, but they could still actually fly. The aerospace fighters were heavily armored, thickly armored, with heavy battle-screens that matched Lanaktallan light frigates. The pilots either hung back and emptied dense missile packs then moved under stealth to a new position while the nano-forges reloaded their packs or came in hard and fast on white-knuckle strafing runs depending on their ship's current loadout.

The ship captains and officers were Confederate Space Force in addition to Treana'ad System Defense, meaning that they had a wide breadth of experienced officers and crews. The ships quickly learned that Lanaktallan weaponry was poor at long range, their missiles were half-blind and easily picked off by the thousands by the point defense systems, and half the time jammers made them just self-destruct.

The DS EWarfare officers found themselves grinding their digital teeth. The Lanaktallan ships had such 'thin' systems that it felt like trying to squeeze themselves through a copper phone line. Half the time they could only take over the ship's limited VI and puppet it while the majority of their thought processes were handled by their attack torpedo. Still, between them and the eVI's (that had to shoulder their way through the systems like a bull in a china shop) they accounted for nearly 15% of both fleets. The command and control ships were the 'fattest' targets, but the DS troops still felt claustrophobic in the systems, often doing the equivalent of 'hyperventilating' when inside the system.

The Lanaktallan fleets pushed hard to make it to the planets only to run face first into far more than they expected. Even their worst simulations didn't take into account what they found around the planets.

They had expected minefields, after all, that was what 'neo-sapients' used to defend their planets.

Except it wasn't minefields, it was missile launchers, each with a dedicated set of nano-forges, FTL communication links, and heavy missiles too big for anything but a dedicated missile wagon. The idea of pod layers stuffed to the brim with pods had been replaced by pod-layers with dedicated nano-forges and mass tanks that could put out a thousand times the number.

The Corporate Fleet ran face first into a wall of missiles so thick they could have gotten out and walked to Smokey Cone itself.

Not one of the Corporate Fleet got within ten light seconds of a planet.

Well their debris did.

On the surface the evacuation to the shelters was calm and orderly, fashionably dressed Civil Defense Matrons moving through the lines with power-smokers, patient moomoo tenders guiding their charges into armored barns that would lower into the depths of the earth to protect the precious moomoos, little hatchlings screeching with joy with their little voices at the images they could see on the nearby Tri-Vees, egg and grub tenders chivvying their charges into their protective pods and sending them whooshing through the system to reach the great under-ground hatching grounds, and the military forces armoring and arming up.

The Hive Queens voted in the War Queen and the others retreated to their bunkers. The Senior High Matrons voted in the six War Matrons and retreated to assume their duties in leading the Treana'ad people during this stressful time.

Discipline and cleverness would see the Treana'ad people through this trial.

The first Lanaktallan forces to reach Smokey Cone itself slammed down onto fields of waist high grain that moved gently with the breeze beneath the huge red sun. They charged out with breathing masks and began trying to set up.

The lead Lanaktallan's helmet blew apart when a high-velocity round hit it just above his six eyes with a loud KRACK!

His brains followed.

Two more Lanaktallan were hit and dropped.

A Lanaktallan Eighteenth Most High pointed at a cloud rushing at them and called out a warning. Point defense on the ships started firing and the cloud spread out, thinned, but kept coming.

The snipers started focusing on the point defense systems and the Lanaktallan trying to set up battlescreen projectors.

The cloud turned out to be tiny drones, the size of a child's palm, that got close and went off. They fired a density collapsed battlesteel dart into the head of the troops, blowing the plassteel helmet apart and turning the head into little more than slurry, before reloading and darting for the next target. They were completely silent, running sonic baffling and suppression systems.

Even the darts were silent.

When there were no more targets, they attached to battlescreen projectors, weapon mounts, point defense systems, drive struts, and exploded with enough force that it not only destroyed what it was attached to but usually penetrated to the inner spaces.

More Lanaktallan charged out, tanks began to roll out, the sides dropped on others to reveal graviton propelled striker craft.

The missiles hit and went off inside the dropships. The tanks didn't have their systems online and the missiles aimed at them came in low, through the grain, propelled by grav-drivers, before suddenly arcing up and firing straight down in a top-down attack method.

The War Queen watched it all, surrounded by monitors. Beside her stood Space Force officers of all races. Her command center was hushed but busy as she oversaw the defense of Smokey Cone. She knew her presence was largely ceremonial, but it helped calm the populace to see a Queen overseeing their defense.

The Lanaktallans landed on the Great Moomoo Plains on Smokey Cone and ran face first into ancient defense systems that had been dusted off and quickly upgraded. A relic from the past, from the Smokey Cone Range Wars and Russelin' Runs, the heavy guns quickly chopped the dropships from the air. The 'local defense forces' made quick work of the few dropships that landed, most of them veterans of various wars since it was still tradition to hire Space Force Army and Marine veterans to help guard the vast moomoo herds.

The War Queen could see that, barring anything major changing, the Lanaktallan would lose the fight in less than four standard days. Already Lanaktallan troops were surrendering, several task forces had refused to cooperate with their fellows and had cut their engines at the resonance zone, and some dropships hit the ground and didn't open, the crews huddling inside.

She ordered that the dropships staying shut would be danced upon by power armor troops to demoralize them.

The Lanaktallan couldn't understand what went wrong.

The Terrans could have told them.

The Treana'ad had won over a fifth of all combat engagements.

They were a silly and goofy people, but they were also a clever people.

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In the Mantid Prime System over 90% of the Lanaktallan forces were killed or forced to surrender before they got anywhere near the three inhabited worlds. Again, they had based all of their strategy and tactics on their memories of the Precursor Mantid.

The Precursor Mantid had never been beaten until their own machines had turned on them.

These Mantid had not only been beaten, but had their society completely destroyed and the upper castes wiped out.

Making them an entirely new people.

They were no longer a unified hive mind throwing their lives away at the wills of the Speakers, the Warriors, and the Queens, they were a hive of individuals all working toward a common goal (for the most part).

The combat craft moved with precision and as a unified whole not because they were one mind without any individualism but because they had trained and had experience at working with one another as well as technological assistance.

The Lanaktallan would have been unsure about what to think about the crews of the light attack craft.

Pursues the Dark Spaces was a black carapaced Mantid. In the days prior to the Daxin Liberation he would have been one of a hundred drones to die to protect and assist a warrior. He would have been trapped, screaming, inside his own mind, as the will of the Warrior Caste would have sacrificed him without a second thought. He would have been nameless but worse he would have been without self determination.

But that was before Daxin the Liberator had killed the Omni-Queen and freed his people.

Now he was an aerospace pilot in a fighting craft designed on Hateful Mars and manufactured in the Hate Anvils of Mars before being shipped to Mantid Prime. There were four engineer stations behind him, each with a highly trained green mantid who's sole job it was to help the computer systems keep the craft at optimum fighting condition.

The nose of his craft, which was a heat shroud wrapped around a rapid fire snub-nose twin barrel C+ cannon, was painted with the red haired female warrior with a sword, the stubby wings, which worked in atomsphere to give him excellent manueverability, had missile pods slung below it with heavy missiles with warheads powerful enough to crack a Lanaktallan heavy frigate's shields in one shot. His battlescreens were more powerful that a Lanaktallan light cruiser's shields.

He was death incarnate.

The Lanaktallan did not know of him, they had not planned for him, they could not understand him.

Or his ten thousand fellow warriors.

From Commander Gwvarwk, who was the Divisional Body Building Champion, to Commander Harold Louise Charnuk who cheated at cards and changed sex more often than Pursues changed hats, to Commander Kilk'iknik who painted the nose of his ship to resemble his favorite ice cream, they were all brothers and sisters in warsteel.

And Pursues knew they would be as dedicated to defending his home as he was.

The Lanaktallan had no idea that the foe they were preparing to fight had been defeated, been beaten, been destroyed eight thousand years ago by the wrath and hate infused fists of an enraged primate.

The Lanaktallan had brought five times as many troopships as they had dedicated to any other attack.

None of them made it to a planet's surface.

They had prepared for their last war against the Mantid.

So they had no idea how they got wiped out.