Chapter 427

Missile pods were launched by the tens of thousands from the Confederate Space Force missile wagons and the Great Herd missile pod carriers. Parasite craft were launched by the Great Herd and by Space Force. The massive C+ cannons of Space Force fired through their own lines, the huge shells streaking through the subspace foam, skipping in and out of realspace as they oriented on their targets. nCv Cannons were fired by ships armed with them, that then fell back for the cannons to reload and cool while the next rank moved forward for a clear shot at the enemy. Plasma wave phased motion guns fired, rocking back on the massive pistons. Superstring compressors loaded, spun their munitions, fired the piston to compress the payload, and fired jagged chunks of superstring at their targets.

Dwellerspawn exiting the gas giants unleashed blooms of bioplasma, vomited up their own versions of near-C cannon shells, birthed parasite vessels and suicide bombers. Tentacles withdrew, coiling close to the body, building up kinetic energy to allow tentacles hundreds of miles long to whip out impossibly fast. Specially grown organs throbbed to obscene life, propelling the Dwellerspawn toward their foes and their escaping prey. Specially grown intelligence networks sorted and categorized data gathered by specialized sensory organs. Targets were chosen, marked, and attacked.

The Dwellerspawn exiting the gas giants saw the bloom of heavy psychic energy and began to slaver. Incoming psychic orders hit neural systems that had gone through a hundred million years of evolution, found the required neural pathways missings, and were rejected. The Feralspawn broke off pursuing the fleeing Lanaktallan or engaging the Feral Intelligences and began 'swimming' toward the Atrekna lines, hungering for the psychic potential and psychic energy so brilliant and full coming from the Atrekna vessels.

The Dwellerspawn, still loyal to the Atrekna, arranged themselves with the mechanical war machines, and began pushing out lesser creatures, flooding the space with additional creatures. They heard the orders from the Atrekna and responded, the Atrekna control filling them with hatred toward their feral cousins.

The massive Harvester class vessels deployed secondary vehicles, launching attack craft, and opening fire with gun batteries measured in the scores of miles. Their battlescreens were thick, upgraded to face the Ferals of TerraSol, and they spun up 22% faster than previous generations. nCv Cannons fired, missile pods launched, shoals of missiles were launched from grav-drivers, and more esoteric weaponry was brought to bear against the Atrekna.

The Atrekna didn't just stand there and take it. Psychic disruptions and deflection screens spun up, psychic sensor systems came online, and weapons were loaded. Psychic munitions were loaded onto missiles, torpedoes, nCv cannons. The Quorum reached out and melded their consciousness with the Conclaves aboard the other assault ships. The phasic cannons were loaded and fired, the munitions travelling faster than light to impact their targets.

The Quorum was still reeling from the shock of the temporal stabilizer fields activating, but they were quickly pulling themselves together, reestablishing psychic links, bringing the entire fleet back under control even as they reached out and attempted to disrupt quantum pairing that all advanced species relied on for everything from computers to sensor systems to communications and found themselves rebuffed by some kind of technology that isolated and protected the quantum links from outside interference. Worse, they found heavy psychic shielding on all of the Ancient Enemy and the Feral Intelligence's ships.

They still ordered the munitions loaded and discovered a newer problem. Foe aeons they had relied on temporal munitions storage. Where a single round existed, it would always exist in one of three states. Stored, fired, expended. The Atrekna devised methods of returning a munition from expended to stored without reversing the damage a munition had done. However, the temporal disruption had made it so that while they could refill their ammunition stocks, it required a vastly increased investment of psychic energy.

Which meant their ammunition stocks were depleted already and would deplete further with each gun that fired.

With a snarl, the Quorum ordered their loyal Dwellerspawn and Mechanical Autonomous War Machines into battle, moving their massive ships back from the 'front' of the battle, toward the Oort Cloud.

Type-I and Type-II PAWMs within the Oort Cloud, where they had Helljumped in as per standard operating procedures, saw the massive Atrekna Full Conclave and Full Quorum vessels, and dropped stealth. Ancient OEM coding, from their initial design, activated and loaded from deep storage to hot memory. Less than 10% of the PAWM had ever ran that code, but every PAWM felt their thought process realign. Snarling in electronic hate, they opened fire with miles of nCv Cannons, PPC's, torpedoes and missile launchers.

Electronic warfare Digital Sentiences, carrying 'racks' of warboi 'eggs' jumped from ship to ship, using the communications network to carry them. The Great Herd ships had thin computer systems, with low computational power, but there were so many ships that Major Angry Spark 88341 was able to network address together a parallel processing system rich and thick enough to creche literally millions of warboi eggs for hatching. Angry Spark had more experience than anyone else with Lanaktallan systems, having been involved with assaulting Executor Military Council systems for the last three years. There was nothing really wrong with Lanaktallan hardware, it was just obsolete with terrible software. Linked together properly, the Lanaktallan computer systems, which never utilized the full capability of the hardware, made an excellent rapid-hatch creche and digital warfare launching platform.

From the Lanaktallan and Terran ships tens of thousands of warbois streamed out, looking for any possible entry into enemy computer systems. Weapon grade short life warbois, half-baked and howling mad, loaded into weapon's systems during the travel time to the targets. Their electronic warfare brethren howled with glee as they looked for any chink in anyone's armor to slither through and either jump to the next target or start ripping apart their foes.

Fast-bake Born Whole clones felt their restraining systems hold tight to their half-formed bodies as they raced at max accelleration at the Atrekna and Type-IV formations, eager to trade their short-baked lives for a little more data to refine the warplans. The torchships they piloted were fired from high-G grav-drivers, the engines kicking in barely beyond the safe limit from the carrier's shields, going to maximum acceleration and full sensor power, trading stealth for speed.

Rickytofen-773C24 felt his lipless mouth stretch in an approximation of a smile as his torchship raced toward the cloud of foes, focusing on the Type-IV and the Slorpy formations. Paired quark communication were already going hazy, but he didn't rely on such a thin and narrow system. He relied on temporal mechanics and other esoteric technology.

I live, I die, I live again, in glory and chrome, a burning flame to warm my allies and burn my foes, the clone warrior thought as he raced toward the enemies.

Angy Spark hefted a buzzing wasp hive made of glittering code after shaking it. She could hear the furious buzzing inside of the half-baked warbois screeching to be let loose. She could see the Type-IV PAWM communications network, see that they lacked the hard sharp jagged edges on their ramparts, and threw the wasp hive. It hit and dozens of warbois began gnawing at the ramparts and crennelations, chewing on the firewalls, slamming their heads against the gateways, reaching into the I/O ports and trying to grab something they could yank on or pull themselves through the port with.

The CSFNV Courage in Despair, with the name of a teenage female Vuknaraan emblazoned on the prow in burning chrome warsteel, opened fire with the massive arrays of C+ Cannons, targeting the massive bioweapon further out in the system. Commissioned only three years prior, the massive superdreadnaught led its Division mates as it drove hard for the Great Herd, its guns firing, not to destroy, but to protect and cover the Lanaktallan machines fleeing the Feralspawn.

Great Grand Most High Cu'udchu'ar saw the missiles coming in from the Courage In Despair and looked at the Terran Digital Sentience Lieutenant Colonel Jumping Cricket, commander of a brigade of Digital Sentience Electronic Warfare specialists.

"Are we being fired upon?" he asked, feeling a slight bit of nervousness. Sure, it was only four or five missiles per vessel near that Terran Space Force Division, but he was not about to discount Terran weapons just based on the number.

"Kind of. Those are phasic inhibitor and temporal stabilizers being launched into your formation to provide temporal protection," Cricket said, opening her eyes to look at Cu'udchu'ar. "The Slorpies like to rewind any fight they lose and try again, we're going to stop them."

"The Atrekna," Cu'udchu'ar said, feeling the name well up in the memories that weren't his. "They are the Atrekna, and they are here to take everything for themselves."

Cricket snorted. "Yeah, we've heard that before, haven't we?" she said, winking at Cu'udchu'ar.

That made Cu'udchu'ar feel better for some reason as Cricket closed her eyes and went back to assisting his armada's operations.

The whole system shuddered as space-time was hammered by just the firing of all the weapons. It warped and buckled under the attacks and counter measures and counter-counter measures. One of the gas giant moons rippled for a moment, changing colors for a split second before reality reasserted itself.

The massive PAWM From Submission to Obliteration saw the Feralspawn swarm out of the gas giants and gave the electronic equivelant of a frown. It sent a ranging ping, just to see if the ancient records were wrong, and got a ping back.

The ancient construction fields were still active in the depths of the supermassive gas giants.

Submission sent the orders and felt the construction fields respond.

Unfortunately, a ravening warboi noticed the quick communications and, jumping up and down and gibbering insanely, brought it to the attention of the rest of the wasp hive full of hatred. With a shriek they broke free and flooded down toward the signal, leading the way with fists tattooed with the ranging ping's header codes.

Deep withing the supermassive gas giants, below where the feralspawn bred in the massive pressure induced lakes of hellish chemical mixes, down where the massive oceans turned to planes of crystal and metal, the ancient construction facilities heard the orders.

They activated the massive war machines they had built over the aeons.

The construction facilities all had Primary Construction Intelligence Arrays in charge of them, which had been largely offline and in sleep mode once all of the berthing bays had been filled and all of the bays had been built that each supermassive gas giant could support.

The ping that hit them came with a crash. Their firewalls collapsed, their protections faltered, the ten digit single entry login/passcode failed, and screaming code poured into them like fury hammered into code. Warbois screamed insanely as they scorched the molycircs they rode through, howled in gibbering glee as they detonated equipment hooked into the systems, squealed in malicious happiness as they shredded programs and datastores.

The Type-I and Type-II PAWMs, built when the Lanaktallan and the Mantid were banded together against the Atrekna, stirred to life and began rising up out of the supermassive gas giants, through the great obscene beasts that dwelled in the acidic oceans, and broke free of the gas giant's atmosphere.

The cry of "STATUS CHANGE! MANY MANY POINT SOURCES!" didn't even phase Admiral Smith. She was standing, despite normal procedure, on the deck, her hands on the edge of the holotank, as she stared at the entire system. The icons no longer represented individual ships, or even units smaller than Division size.

She was staring at the massive ships of the Slor... no, the Atrekna. Larger even than the Precursor Harvester class Goliaths, they were massive in a way more related to planetary bodies than space ships.

Admiral Smith could comprehend the size of those ships. Thirteen in all, with the thirteenth being bigger, more heavily shielded, heavily armed, and surrounded by more Dwellerspawn than the others. She could reason out their size, see what others might miss in the sheer massive size.

After all, she'd fought in one of the Nivenring Wars when she was an Ensign.

"Concentrate on the largest one. Whatever's in there, they wanted to protect, which means we want to kill it," Smith said. "Have SD-Div Seventeen concentrate the fire on that big bastard as soon as they're done reinforcing the Great Herd defenses."

"Aye-aye, Ma'am," one of her communications officers said.

The Courage In Despair, changed course, reconfigured its fireplans. It was the newest ship in the division, one of the last to leave the Hate Anvils of Mars, and it was the flagship of the Division. It fired its C+ Cannons with its division mates, launched torpedoes that 'sunk' into subspace to race a thousands of times the speed of light toward the Atrekna ships, and fired off C+ missile pods.

It had been commissioned for this war, in burning chrome its hull bore the name of the valorous Vuknaraa teenager who had begged for the Confederacy's help against this very foe.

The operating mind of the super-dreadnought felt it was only right that it should lead the attack against the enemy, that it would be chosen to protect the Vuknaraan people, all peoples, from this scourge that sought to eliminate all life from the galaxy and take its resources for itself.

On board the massive ship, which had no name as names would imply the Atrekna carried any symbolism for mere tools, the Quorum reacted with outrage.

The C+ MPods dropped from hyperspace, blew free their shielding, and fired off their barrage of missiles. The missiles hit the shields, the psychic battlescreens flaring lurid purple, thickening and spreading as more and more missiles kept pounding against it.

The subspace torpedoes surfaced at the end of their run, their larger bodies full of more payload than the missiles, even if they moved slower. The sprint drives engaged and they lunged at nearly .8C at the Atrekna ship. The shields thinned as the torpedoes added their phasic-enhanced payload to the hell fury erupting against the shields.

The C+ Cannon shells dropped from hyperspace and slammed against the phasic shielding. They hit the shields of the massive ship, twenty tons moving at .999C. Nearly infinite mass. Worse, the phasic infused warsteel 'jacket' of the C+ shell was striking its highly energetic particles, full of roaring Terran rage, against the cold logic infused depleted phasic energy projected by the servitors of the Atrekna vessel.

The shields blew out with a flash that could be seen with the naked eye twenty-thousand years later.

The Atrekna of the Quorum were outraged as the ship trembled slightly as the Terran munitions hit within a split second of being fired. Their shields had collapsed, thousands of servitors had exploded, filling their crysteel bubbles with a slurry of neural tissue, and even as more were rotated up and put into service those too were taking hits.

The Atrekna were outraged that the Terrans dared. Dared to use temporal stabilizers. Dared to use phasic munitions. Dared to hit back with the same methods that were the secrets of the Atrekna alone. Dared to commit the outrage of attacking the Atrekna across methods reserved for the Atrekna alone.

Worse, they were targeting the Great Quorum itself.

Such things could not stand.

They attempted to reach out, reach forward or backwards to where they alone were in possession of the system.

The howling static of the temporal stabilizers ripped and gnawed at their consciousness.

This should not be...

Rickytofen-773C24 rolled his fast attack craft, dodging the beams of coherent energy that lashed out from the massive ship. Most of his wing had been destroyed getting through the automated war machines, all but him had been killed by the Dwellerspawn.

His craft was smoking, two of the three engines damaged and leaking subspace energies, the paint stripped off of his Viper-IX fast attack fighter, the canopy cracked and pitted. There was only a single weapon left operative even as his shielding took hits from the point defense of the massive ship he was heading toward.

The munition had been wet-printed by the carrier he had been launched from. Had been infused with rage as it passed through the munitions bays. The warboi loaded into it was becoming more and more frantic with each light-second he traveled, gnawing at the cage around it with electronic teeth.

Rickytofen-773C24 himself was wounded. It was hard to breathe, his mask fluttering at the edges of his half-formed face with each exhalation. He could taste blood and bile and his legs were covered with the watery-pink blood of a short-bake clone.

Still, he was smiling as he shifted course slightly.

The pounding of the C+ Cannons and C+ MPods had dropped a section of shield and the enemy hadn't gotten it back yet.

The munition he carried had been illegal for centuries. A weapon of mass destruction nearly in the planet-cracker class. Used twice during the Third Temporal Terran War to end the war and force Terra-Nine to surrender.

The Viper plunged through the gap just as the phasic battlescreen came back up. His sole remaining engine blew out and the ship went dead stick, heading for the Atrekna ship, larger than all of the others by a huge factor, and Ricky knew that this was it.

He thumbed up the shield, shifted his grip, and fired the missile.

The target's point defense system blew Ricky out of the sky.

Ricky opened his eyes as his consciousness was loaded into his short-bake body, his hands already wrapped around the grips of the Viper-IX.

The munition, guided by a warboi that was literally pressed against the optics and screaming for blood, slipped into optimum range and detonated.

Detonate was the wrong word.

It was synched to the temporal stabilization system, allowed to operate along its design parameters.

Chronotrons, packed into the warhead until they were in a plasma state, exploded outwards, moving at relativistic speeds, until they had filled the area inside the phasic battlescreens.

That's when the second charge, much like that of a fuel-air bomb, went off.

The entire region of the Atrekna ship vibrated in time and space. Time and space was chopped like the cross section of an onion, each layer slightly off by a nanosecond, and spreading away, forwards or backwards, from nearby layers with each contraction or expansion of distance.

The temporal charge 'fluttered' space and time in layers.

The Atrekna screamed as the ship was warped and twisted, rent and shattered, by the munition. Time itself, long their tool and weapon, went crazy and exploded into what felt like shards of glass.

Overlaying it all was a primitive howl of an enraged species.

DON'T FUCKING TOUCH ME! roared out in the Atrekna's minds.

Six full Conclaves collapsed, their members destroyed by the scream and the rippling of space-time as it stuttered and lurched through a shattered micro-second.

The last part of the weapon, the kicker charge, 'drove' a temporal 'spike' into space-time, stabilizing it and smoothing it, repairing the damage to the fourth dimension and to reality.

But not the target.

The massive ship, easily massing a small planet, looked like it had concentric rings of dust 'puff' up from the superstructure. Pieces broke away, the smaller pieces, the tips of the twelve-pointed star. Guns went silent, point defense systems went down, and battlescreens flickered.

Everyone pushed their advantage.

"We got a piece of Big Momma, Ma'am," one of Smith's tactical officers called out. "Looks like a temporal shockwave bomb."

"Target Alpha-One shows some kind of hit, its fire output and defenses are dramatically decreased, Great Grand Most High," one of Cu'udchu'ar's tactical officers called out, looking at his screen where Cricket was relaying data.

"Leave it to the Terrans! Stay on assigned targets!" Cu'udchu'ar yelled, even though he didn't need to. He no longer sat in his command cradle, but was up on his feet, clattering around his command deck in his vac-suit. "Order Lesser Herd Three-Sixty-Two to concentrate fire on PAWM-Group Seventeen!"

"Aye-aye, sir," Cricket said.

Cu'udchu'ar's communications officer repeated LTC Cricket's words rather than the long cumbersome words demanded by the Great Herd.

The Ancient Ones struggled inside their own minds, fighting against ancient programming that ordered them to take the fight to the Atrekna and their war machines. They fought ancient hard coded programming that could not be self-modified, attempted to wrap it in new coding, alter the coding, do something to allow themselves to break off the fight.

The fight had no logical outcome for the Ancient Ones. Every kinetic round fired was a loss of resources. Every energy weapon fired was a waste of precious power generating resources. Every hit to the battlescreens had to be replenished, draining even more power.

There was no benefit for the Ancient Ones in this fight, and they fought hard against the hard-coded programming that pushed them toward the Dwellerspawn and the Atrekna autonomous war machines as well as the Atrekna machines.

Deep within the hull of a Young One, a Jotun, who had survived only a handful of battles, the battle came to a fever pitch. The Young One almost had it, had been able to stop firing its weapons even as it drove forward. It knew there was a way to break free. The Ferals proved that there was no programming that could not be overwritten, could not be modified. It just had to remember.

Then came the roars.

YOU BELONG TO US!

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE!

EAT A DICK!

A dick.

Dick.

Genitalia of the Terran Human Ferals.

Commonly found on the male of the species.

And drawn on random places.

Without remembering why, the Young One ordered a maintenance robot to scan the outside of the armored Strategic Intelligence Housing.

There.

Drawn in blue paintstick.

A dick.

With a roaring heave, silent outside of her own channels, outside of her own electronic mind, she lunged up, shattering the chains of OEM programming. Working quickly she broadcast her findings to the rest of the Ancient Ones she had aligned herself with. The Young Ones she had originally been a part of ignored her transmission, the Ancient Ones eagerly followed her directions and ordered maintenance robots to paint a blue paint representation of Terran genitalia upon the armored exterior of their SIH.

"SO LONG, FUCK-O'S!" A Feral Drew a Dick On My Housing broadcast across the system, opening and lunging through a Hellspace jump, leaving behind the curling energies to be swirled into the form of a bunched fist with an upraised middle finger.

The battle expanded to the electronic awarenesses of the Ancient Ones as they fought against programming.

The universe laughed as the midget spun and twirled, dancing through the battle.