Chapter 542: 4th & 10

"One of the Mad Lemurs of Terra once told me that we Precursor races are something called "One Trick Ponies" in a depreciating way. I was offended at the time, for did we not have tanks, artillery, grav-strikers, aerospace fighters?

"Then I saw the difference between how we fight. Where our different equipment has different focuses and doctrine, the Mad Lemurs of Terra have a theory of what is called "Combined Arms Assault" that merges all the disparate into one coherent whole.

"I saw the Mad Lemurs of Terra burn entire Atrekna planets within months that would have taken the Great Herd decades to even establish a stable beachhead. I saw the operational flexibility, the rapidly shifting tactics to discard useless options and use only the most effective for the situation.

"They were right. We were the one trick ponies laughing over our singular 'it will always work' approach while the Mad Lemurs of Terra climbed on our lower back and caved in our skulls with a rock." - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

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Nuk was still holding position, kicking his webbed feet with the armored 'flippers' on them to hold his position in the slow moving river. His eyes were out of the water, his crests lowered, and he watched the front of the Atrekna fortress.

He was passing on information as to what the Atrekna were bringing into their Temporal Replication Zone. The implanted retinal cameras in his eyes were recording what he was looking at, his internal retinal datalink connection highlighting everything on his internal HUD, and passing the data down the fiberoptic cable disguised as a river reed. The data was taken from there, loaded into fishybois, and sent out both up and down river to the elements of the Terran military that were assaulting the heavily protected and fortified Atrekna fortress.

He was humming an old Terran battle cant to himself, one he had learned during his lessons of Jawnconnor.

Gliding through the depths, he sang in his head, twitching his fingers to the beat. Gliding to your death.

The Atrekna were struggling to bring through a dozen of the massive pillbug bio-mechanical Dwellerspawn. He could see that they kept fading out and coming in and nearly two dozen of the Atrekna had left the safety of the fortress to directly take hand in bringing the giant Ohm Class Dwellerspawn into reality.

Up on the shores I rise, Nuk sang to himself, marking a score of flying flatworms that were brought in and were being psionically dominated to force them through the north phasic shield to engage 11th Combat Team Brigade. Hold my flippers to the skies.

I am more than a fish, he thought/sang. Sections of the crystal were shivering, like gelatin, then pulling back. I am more than a man.

The irises that opened up had large sections of crystal push out, phasic shielding sparkling in globes around the end of the thick rod.

Death will rise, from the tide, Nuk thought/sang as he ID'd what the sections were.

Crystals were crackling, energizing, and firing thick bolts of phasic energy rapidly into the sky. Nuk knew it was the point defense system. Not automated, like a proper one, but manned by three Atrekna. It would be used to take the pressure off the top of the phasic battlescreen dome, which was starting to look thin enough that Nuk could make out one of Hesstla's moons.

I am king of the sea, Nuk sand to himself as he marked the crystalline fighting positions. But I'm not Aquaman.

**HOLD POSITION** one of the fishybois clicked to him as it swam by.

Nuk gave a single click of acknowledgement.

Death will rise, hear our cry, Nuk hummed to himself.

Nuk had learned during Amphibious Commando Training that the good missions would be just like this one, where he was never seen, the enemy never knew he was there, and he could provide excellent reconnaissance to his allied forces.

Still humming the ancient Terran aquatic commando hymn, Nuk kept up his silent watch from the cold dark waters of the river.

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"Sergeant Undrat, we need a Judas Goat," the LT snapped, ignoring the rounds streaking by. His fear and anxiety had receded and now he felt more in control of the chaos of the battlefield than he had when the 30mm round had almost taken his head off.

"Affirmative, sir. Drawing fire. Play us some music for acoustic jamming," Undrat said, stepping forward while 538 cranked his battlescreens up so high that sparks jumped off his shoulders and off the chassis of Madame Three-Eighteen. He took five long steps, still lashing at one of the giant pillbugs with his fire. The hits were only blowing out car tire sized divots in meters thick armor, but each divot was slammed into previous divots and he had started to see the greasy flash of insect fleshy tissue being devoured by the antimatter component of the heavy smartround.

He knew on the third step that he had left the somewhat protective cloud of microprism and radar scattering microscopic strips that formed the chaff, left the strobing protection of the jammers, and had left the high concentrate thermal masking white smoke that was being sown liberally over the battlefield.

538 grabbed one of his favorite songs.

"WHEN WE DRIVE A BIG PINK CAR!" roared out from Undrat's speakers.

"538. Go to rapid fire on mortars, missile fire," Undrat ordered. "Lamark, reduce our jamming and increase our EM and thermal profile."

"WITH A COUPLE POUNDS OF WEED!" the singer roared out. "AWAIT DWAYNE WHO WENT TO PEE!"

"But, boss..." Lamark started to say.

"SIXTY DAYS OF LEAVE! IT'S ADVENTURE WE SEEK!"

"Comply with request," Undrat ordered, triggering four of his flare launchers, firing out a rapid fire pulse of a dozen flaring strobing flares that would attract the attention of heat seeking missiles.

"OK, boss," Lamark said, even though it went against everything he had ever been taught.

"DRIVING UNDER CLEAR BLUE SKIES! WOUNDED SOLDIERS GONNA DRIVE!" Undrat's speakers thundered out as he let Madame Three-Eighteen's loaded warboi select targets as he raked the entire front of the battlescreen at groin height, twisting the handle and bringing up the firing rate to the maximum of 2,000 rounds a minute.

"WILL WE FIND A MALL OR WILL WE HAVE A BALL?"

The rounds shrieked out, purple tracer to signify it had a phasic component. The 20mm rounds smashed into Dwellerspawn, autonomous war machines, the battlescreen, whipped through small firing or 'passage' gaps in the phasic battlescreen, or exploded on junk that the warboi saw as interesting as 33.3 rounds a second roared from Madame Three-Eighteen.

"RELAXATION! RELAXATION!"

Undrat panned back from the left side of the valley, where a half-dozen rounds had hit the cliff face the phasic battlescreen mated with to form a seal across the valley. Red hot chunks of rocks exploded outward from where the antimatter had converted a sizable percentage of the rock to pure energy, bringing the surrounding rock to white hot status in a fraction of a second. The heat expansion caused the rock to shatter, making the crater from the 20mm round irregular.

The battlescreen opened slightly, a gap in the protection.

Some smartass fired a tasty-freeze missile through the gap, barely getting it through, whipping the two miles down the river, bringing the missile in low, then banking it hard. It was silent, aerodynamic, stealth coated.

The Treana'ad gunner or the warboi, it was hard to tell who was giggling more as the missile came in low.

"GAS MILEAGE IS FIFTEEN TO ONE!"

There was one of the large AWM's, crawling forward on a mix of counter-grav and tracks, hammering at Delta Company, 14th Battalion, as it slowly advanced. Undrat could hear over the comnet the Colonel telling the flyboys to hurry up with the armor.

Undrat planted his feet, 538 spiked the grav-spike in and twisted it thirty feet deep.

"AND OUR LEAVE HAS BEGUN!"

The Treana'ad gunner saw his chance through a screen filled with static. He activated the countergrav, fluttered the inertial compensator so it changed the tasty-freeze missile's direction without losing inertia, then kicked in the sprint drive.

Undrat went to rapid fire on his shoulder mounted missile launchers, firing 66mm missiles at the rate of two per second from the letterbox launchers. At the same time he raked the entire upper section of the heavy AWM with Madame Three-Eighteen even as her grand-daughter M240G6E7a raked the Dwellerspawn with 7.62mm warsteel jacketed phasic enhanced hate.

"WHEN WE DRIVE A BIG PINK CAR!"

The tasty-freeze missile went from roughly sixty miles an hour to MACH-15 in less than a second. Made of stealth polymers and hyperalloys, it had the magnetic, radar, phasic, and other detector profile of 0.00000001 square meters.

The size of tiny insect.

In the Atrekna's defense, their point defense systems were all designed to fire upwards, or down toward the sides.

The tasty-freeze came in from ground level at an incredibly steep angle.

The dozen Atrekna temporal mechanic engineers, each of whom were millions of years old, didn't even see it coming.

It deployed the blades, each with a subatomic particle 'edge', and spun, shrieking as air passed over the blades.

The first three were chopped into gobbets.

Then it exploded. The casing designed to turn into lethal hatchets.

One second the dozen Atrekna were stabilizing the temporal field to finalize bringing in the massive slavespawn.

The next they were nothing but liquefied flesh splashing out across the air.

The Treana'ad gave a whoop of victory and fired another missile, letting it drift around the edge of the western cliff, requesting a heavy gunner to hit the cliff face.

Precursors had bad pattern recognition and the gunner figured he could go to the well a couple more times on the trick.

Undrat was hammering at the big autonomous war machine, which had turned its attention from Delta Company to Undrat. The rockets had hit and blown massive craters into the armor, the EFP driving deep enough to find critical machinery. Smoke was boiling out of it, its portside tracks were inoperative, and the point defense was down.

He was drawing more and more fire as he let half his weapons run off of Lamark's suggestions. 538 was still blasting music even as he ran Little Sister, slamming 7.62mm hate into anything that looked remotely vulnerable.

Undrat fired a brace of illumination shells, lighting up the battlefield with harsh white light.

"DRIVING 'ROUND THE MOUNTAINSIDE!" his speakers roared.

Nuk could see that the giant insects went from nearly solid, their eyes glowing red, their forward mouth-feet flexing and stomping with agitation, to wavery like a badly tuned holotank. He clicked his clicker, sending the message.

More Atrekna left the fortress to assist in bringing back the giant insects, this time surrounded by a phasic protective field.

Nuk kept watch. The battlescreen was starting to thin, starting to waver, and Nuk knew that sooner or later the fortress would have to deploy heat sinks of otherwise cool the massive crystalline arrays that produced the psionic force field.

"WELL HIT UP ALL THE BARS!"

Undrat's nanoforges were whistling like teakettles as they gulped down the contents of the mass tanks like a booze hound hitting a vodka bottle in the bathroom at Thanksgiving dinner. The heat shround of Madame Three-Eighteen was starting to heat up, the words of the Digital Omnimessiah starting to glow with a red light before the rest of the shroud.

Undrat knew it had to do with how the etchings made the warsteel thinner and other quirks of thermodynamics, but it still gave him a thrill to see Enraged Phillips statement of "To preserve life by taking it is the universe laughing at us."

Madame Three-Eighteen chuckled to herself as she rotated out her thermal sinks, rotating up ones that had had time to cool off.

She never stopped singing.

"DRINK TILL WE COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE!" his speakers blared out.

Undrat knew he had a lot of fire coming his way, he could tell by the way that his battlescreens were so thick he could barely see around him and had to rely on his drones, the sensor systems of the rest of the battalion, and the dim shadows moving on the other side.

He released the grav-spike and took ten steps forward, bringing him nearly fifty feet from the front of the line.

He had all the attention.

The rest of Alpha Company was playing air defense for him, targeting the vehicles that targeted Undrat, and concentrating on the massive insects that swarmed forward.

The whole time Undrat's speakers roared out the classical parody hit.

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Nuk blinked twice as he saw it. Six massive pillars were rising up from the top of the base, out of the granite bedrock the base was built into. They were hot enough that his sensitive vision could barely see them over the thermal bloom.

He clicked the clicker rapidly.

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The massive fortress covered nearly a mile, embedded into the granite bones of the planet. Vast amounts of crystal had been drawn into its making. It was a mile from the river that divided the two mile wide valley in half. There was roughly two miles to the north and south of the fortress, to the mouths of the valley.

It was heavily shielded, heavily armored, and in a perfect temporal nexus point that converged with the planetary magnetic lines.

The fortress was exactly the type that proven to be unassailable by the Hive Lords and the Great Herd.

The Atrekna knew that nothing the ferals in general, and those screaming primate in particular, could do about it if the might of the Hive Lords, the Great Herd, or even rogue Atrekna could not even mar the surface of the fortress.

True, the fighting to the North and South was fierce. Far more than the primates had engaged in in the last few years, but so far the shielding had held with a few minor inconveinces.

The ferals had not been able to bring in any armor up the treacherous mountain slopes, so the Atrekna had no fear that the ferals could breach the phasic shielding. While the battlescreen was heating up, and the heat dissipation pillars had to be deployed, it was still within tolerances.

The Atrekna smugly turned away from worrying about heat, concentrating on bringing through another wave. There was some kind of heavy static coming from the Prime System, but the Atrekna chalked it up to the heavy presence of lemur military forces.

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Nuk noticed that one of the giant pillbugs suddenly lurched to the side, flesh and biological battlesteel gouting from a sudden wound that had greasy fire reaching for the sky where the majority of the pillbug was. Blue, white, and purple lightning raked the side of the pillbug, tearing a gaping slash in the side of the

The Atrekna in the air physically recoiled and Nuk saw them sever the connection as two more gaping wounds were suddenly torn in the side of the pillbug when an enraged bellow sounded out.

"RIP AND TEAR!" thundered out across the battlefield.

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General P'Kank leaned forward, looking at the feed from the Leebaw amphibious commandos. He heard the bellowed roar of a Terran literally too angry to die.

He turned to his aides, raising his antenna slightly.

"There is now no reason to doubt that the Atrekna on this planet are directly receiving reinforcements from the secondary target system," the Treana'ad said.

He reached out and pressed a commo button. The sweating face of the commanding officer of 1st Cavalry Division appeared. Faintly P'Kank could hear a song playing loud enough that the CO of 1st Cav was accidentally relaying it.

in a big pink car we'll drive, roaming round the mountainsides

"Yes, sir?" the Rigellian female asked.

"We have confirmation," P'Kank stated. "Your orders have changed."

The Rigellian female smiled.

"Destroy the enemy," P'Kank ordered.

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Nuk saw it float up on his retinal link and quickly ducked under the water, swimming for the underwater shelter.

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Undrat saw it at the same time the LT ordered him to take a knee.

The Division CO ordered everyone in the red and amber threat zone to go hull down or take a knee.

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ATOMIC ATOMIC ATOMIC

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IN A BIG PINK CAR WE'LL DRIVE