Chapter 611: Interlude

>>TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Sis, come out. Have some popcorn and some spiced and baked festive holiday gourd seeds.

Come on. Come out.

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>>MANTID FREE WORLDS

No.

I'm fine right here behind the couch in my blanket fort.

But hand me some popcorn and seeds.

Ooh, and a Fizzybrew.

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>>AKLTAK SOARING WORLDS

I thought the Terrans announced themselves and offered an opportunity to surrender.

I know they sterilized systems that were Lanaktallan controlled during the war, but this is really different.

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>>LEEBAW CONTEMPLATION POOL

It's like these guys are completely silent.

It's eerie.

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>>RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

They're... not TDH.

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>>DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Oof. The Theseus? They mean business.

Ooh, Quack is being fielded?

That flotilla is roughly a fifth of their known ships. That means that, if they follow their patterns over the last eight thousand years, they've got another 5th in for rearming and repairs, another fifth preparing for a mission, and the remaining 2/5ths guarding their systems as backup for the home guard.

If Quack was activated, that means their four or five other heavyweights are too.

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>>CONFEDMIL

We've spotted three of the others.

We haven't spotted Hell's Heart yet.

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>>MANTID FREE WORLDS

Thank the Digital Omnimessiah.

brrrrr

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>>AKLTAK SOARING WORLDS

OK, who are they if they aren't TDH?

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>>TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Yeah.

I mean, their ship lines are all off, they make sure the ship's lit up like they want it targeted, and how did they come in? What was that? I've never seen anything like it!

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>>LANAKTALLAN FREE HERD

How did you get this, Telkan?

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>>TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

I'm not at liberty to say.

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>>CONFEDMIL

I know, so does CONFEDINT and CONFEDMILINT.

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>>MANTID FREE WORLDS

Oooh.

That planet's going to need some spackle, maybe a new coat of paint.

Oof.

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>>TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Aw, it's just cosmetic damage, I'm sure of it.

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>>PUBVIAN DOMINION

Yeeeeeeeeah, that's a kill...

I just looked at the record. They showed up during the Second Terran/Mantid War, huh? Just watching? Popping up here and there during some of the fights since The Glassing?

We know where they're coming from yet?

I mean, you had 8,000 years to figure it out.

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>>CONFEDMIL

Uh, well... you see...

Uh.

No.

No we don't.

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>>PUBVIAN DOMINION

You are least know who they are beyond the blindingly obvious, right?

Are they one of the old United Nations slowships? Are they a Hamburger Kingdom slowship? A Your-a-Goon slowship? Any idea?

Did you at least figure that out?

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>>CONFEDMIL

Well... no.

They still refuse to communicate beyond warning everyone to stay back or be targeted.

They haven't been interested in communicating with anyone.

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>>MANTID FREE WORLDS

Well, they always send a ship with some variation of the name "We don't wanna talk" in their flotilla.

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>>RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Looks like that one's going for low orbit with some support ships. The others are making least time courses for the other inhabited worlds.

This is gonna be ugly.

I think

>>LANAKTALLAN FREE HERD

ONE TWO THREE FOUR GO!

WE ARE ALL THINKING THE SAME THING RIGHT NOW! UNCLE MIKEY IS THE BEST! BE GOOD TO EACH OTHER!

heeheeheeheeheeheehehee

I am sorry. I do not know why they did that.

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Rigel>laughs

No, no, it's OK. It happens to Trea all the time.

It's a good thing. It means they've figured out that they control you, not the other way around.

Trust me, it's a good thing.

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>>TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Yeah. They do it to me all the time.

I don't think it's funny, but they find it hilarious.

Ooooh, looks like they're having their dropships pull low orbits.

This is going to get ugly.

>munches popcorn

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Choi watched as the last vessel took position in low orbit, a chain of a dozen smaller warships following it, all increasing the gap between them until they were evenly spaced around the planet.

The Pearl Mantid's Nightmare was over the second planet from the stellar mass, the Entropy's Little Sister over the third, and The Terrible Silence of the Ducklings over the third.

She watched as lights struck down, ripping through the atmosphere, to impact on the vast crystal cities. Fireballs rose into the sky as the kinetic kill weapons, all with the bluish-white snap of antimatter at the core, obliterated the large cities. Boiling clouds, bloody and full fire, clawed into the stratosphere as the shockwaves rolled out across the rest of the city.

"They've started orbital bombardment, Captain," Captain/Commodore Hooker said softly. "Looks like tungsten wrapped around Cole-Bunch Imperium-X with a hydrogen anti-matter core. Explosions in the 50 megaton range."

"Logged," Choi said.

The strikes had not come one at time. They had all occurred simultaneously across all three worlds. All the 'flight' times staggered so that the blasts happened within milliseconds of each other.

She didn't like the coordination one bit.

"Dropships detected," Hooker said. "Big ones. Same types as on record."

Time went by. Three minutes before the dropships would have made landfall, Hooker spoke again.

"Warmek launches. Pod launches. Fast entry," he said. "Just over eighty thousand," he paused again. "Those ships must be little more than troops holding and engines."

"Is it standard to the records?" Choi asked.

"Affirmative. Exact same tactics, timing, sequencing," Commander Tilkak'Nok said, clicking his mandibles. "To think, the Great P'Thok faced such creatures on the battlefield in little more than plasteel armor and a plasma rifle."

Choi just nodded.

The pod and warmek landings went exactly as she expected, with big explosions. The pod ones were only perhaps a hundred meters in diameter, but the warmek ones sometimes went out to kilometers. The pods were ablative and burned off on reentry, leaving a kneeling power armored troop in the crater, one knee and one fist in the red hot rock beneath them.

"Scans coming back. Looks like they still haven't updated their power armor or warmek designs," Hooker said.

"Looks can be deceiving," Choi said. "Do we have ground signals or just orbital?"

"I can deploy intra-atmospheric stealth drones," Hooker said.

"Do so," Choi 'closed' her eyes and heaved a deep breath.

She had watched planets get murdered and now there was about to be an absolute bloodbath with no quarter asked or given.

Not to say she hadn't taken part in some horrific shit before. Clownface, Mithril, Triple-C most recently.

But there was just something horrific about what she was watching through Hooker's drones.

More than a few times it looked like the ground forces were firing at nothing only for there to be a spray of purple blood and viscera, gobbets of purple flesh, with the purplish-white snap of collapsing phasic protections.

"Looks like Atrekna stealth shielding isn't up to snuff," Commodore Tunlu'uk said.

Choi just nodded.

"Quack and Theseus are engaging spaceborne Dwellerspawn," Hooker siad.

Choi turned her attention.

The extra ships, roughly three each, were sitting silent. There was no special effects, no using side effects of the weapon use for interesting and morale busting visual/audio effects. No flashing of guns, no ripples in spacetime.

Just energy surges just outside the barrels of the heavy guns.

Choi watched the oncoming Dwellerspawn. She had to admit, there was a lot of them. Six of the ones that General NoDra'ak had called "Big Slobbery Mo" were advancing on cilia surrounded by graviton energy.

The rounds reached the Dwellerspawn and 'detonated'.

"By Kalki's Dancing Goat," Commander Tilkak'Nok said softly.

This time space definitely warped. The weapons went off, creating an artificial singularity that the instruments estimated was slightly smaller than a marble. Flesh and armor was sucked off the Dwellerspawn by gravity, spiraling down into an ever decreasing tentacle. The singularity lit up with a bright whitish-blue light.

"Hydrogen antimatter reactions detected," Hooker said. He stayed silent, not bothering to say anything else.

There was really nothing else to say.

Choi didn't say anything, just watched as the giant hive ships and their attendants were sucked into the artificial gravity singularities. Another barrage 'detonated' at the same time as the artificial black hole lost cohesion and exploded in a ravening orb of energy.

It was over in minutes. Both huge armadas were wiped out, leaving nothing but expanding energy.

"Theseus and Quack are firing on autonomous war machine armadas, ma'am," Hooker added.

Choi watched as the singularities ripped apart the massive machines. The bombardment lasted nearly six minutes, the two 'Earthling' fleets shifting position to avoid the light speed lag counter-strikes, letting them pass by with only a few dozen kilometers to spare, as if they really didn't care.

Six minutes later there was nothing more than expanding gas, light, and shredded atoms.

"Theseus and Quack are firing on the stellar mass," Hooker said. This time he sounded choked up.

Time went by.

"Impact. No apparent effect," Hooker said.

"It could take days or week for any effect to be apparent," Tilkak'Nok said. "Pressure at a star's core is extremely intense."

"Let's not forget who we're watching," Choi said. "Keep an eye on the stellar mass."

Hours passed while Choi watched the slaughter on the ground. Several times screaming life forms she didn't recognize ran by the Earthling forces as the Earthling forces advanced into the teeth of the Atrekna.

Eight times she watched as the Atrekna attempted to get the Earthlings to slow down or stop by carrying neo-sapients or Lanaktallan inside war machines or attached to the war machines.

It would have worked against the Confederacy, forced the Confederacy to either come up with a new plan or hold strategy meetings to determine what to do.

The Earthlings didn't hesitate.

They just fired anyway.

The Atrekna's pattern recognition finally kicked in and they realized that the strategy might have bought them breathing room against the Confederacy or the Terran Descent Humans but it was completely useless against these new foes.

What bothered her is how they were completely silent. Hooker's drones picked up every decibel of screaming, every whisper of weapons fire, every hint of noise.

The only thing you could hear from the forces all in iron gray was the humming and hissing of mechanics from the massive warmeks.

No music. No shouting. No warnings.

Just advance.

Shoot.

Kill.

They stomped through mushroom forests growing on sand, existing despite the fact that Choi knew you only got mushrooms on top of thick loam or decaying material. Not that the massive red and white spotted mushrooms, some nearly fifteen meters high, cared what Choi knew. They firmly insisted on existing despite Choi's xenobiology degree.

They stomped through shattered crystal cities, raking fire on any intact crystal, at mid air until the purple blood splashed, crushing giant engraved and inlaid crystals thrumming with phasic energy into gleaming shards.

Warmeks stood outside of intact cities and poured megatons of firepower into them, then stomped on, searching out their next target. The smaller ones, which Hooker had ID'd as Frogstar Power Armor, advanced into the city in what could best be described as 'mop up'.

More and more of the crew started showing signs of distress, so she lowered their consciousness level and rotated in their replacements.

She forced herself to watch the days of slaughter.

She didn't bother watching the Quack and the Theseus engage Atrekna piloted vessels. She knew the outcome of that before they even reached engagement distance.

No call to surrender, no command to cut their engines. Just bombardment with artificial singularities of compressed antimatter hydrogen and then expanding energy and sundered matter.

All in silence.

"Warmeks are engaging anti-grav. Looks like their making for orbit," Hooker said. "Dropships are recalling troops."

"At least they spared the civilians not in the fire zone," Commander Tilkak'Nok said. He sounded slightly sick when he said it. He'd seen Atrekna attempt to hide behind civilians and the silent power armor troops just shoot through the civilians as if they were paper targets.

"Anything from the stellar mass?" Choi asked.

"Nothing yet," Hooker said.

It was silent for several hours until only one dropship remained.

"Crap," Hooker suddenly said.

"What?" Choi asked, mentally reaching for the panic button.

"They know we're here," he said. "Or at least, that someone's here."

"How?" Choi asked.

"One of my drones is being commo-lased. Encryption and playback codexes from the Mar-gite War," he said. He frowned. "It's audio-visual feed."

"Let's see it," Choi said. "Everyone, brace yourselves, this might be ugly."

Choi expected a message, a Earthling giving a lecture or commands or a warning, or text orders.

Instead the image cleared to a local equivalent of a tree. The bark was thin and smooth, the leaves almost crystalline, the branches intricately intertwined.

Sitting on one of the branches was an avian. Bright feathers, what looked like short stubby crystals growing out of its head and down its spine.

It was singing. A complex fast paced cheeping and tweeting tune.

A gray armored hand reached up in a fist and Choi tensed.

The index finger extended and a chirping whistle sounded.

The bird looked at the finger and hopped off the branch and onto the finger.

All that existed in the image was the fist, the finger, and the crystal-finch against a reddish sky.

For almost a minute the whistle and the bird's chirping wove together.

The bird fluttered away.

END TRANSMISSION appeared.

There was silence.

"Last dropship lifting off," Hooker said. "What was that about?"

Choi shook her head. "I don't know. Sounds like something for MilInt-Psych to figure out."

"Stellar mass status change! Gravitation status change!" Hooker suddenly called out. "Looks like the system is surfacing."

"How fast?" Choi asked.

"Looks slow. Probably take several hours," Commander Tilkak'Nok said.

"Recall the drones. Self destruct any too far to recall," Choi ordered.

"Aye-aye, ma'am," Hooker said.

The ship was silent again, Choi hovering between wakefullness and stimulated dreams, when she was pinged and 'opened' her 'eyes' to see what was happening.

The stellar mass was changing color, shrinking, returning to yellowish.

"BRACE!" Commander Tilkak'Nok called out.

Space reverberated, shuddered, twisted, and howled as the system crested from the 'divot' it was in and spread back out to realspace.

"STATUS CHANGE!" Hooker called out.

Choi turned and looked.

"It's a trade ship! Squawking Telkan registry! The Earthlings have it locked up!" Hooker said.

Choi could see the Telkan trader.

It was in the middle of the loose formation of gray ships, less than a million kilometers from the Deathblossom.

"Shit."

>>MANTID FREE WORLDS

OOoooh, I can't watch.

>hides her eyes

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>>TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

It's so exciting!

>munches popcorn.

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