Chapter 899: End of Days

Chapter 899: End of Days

HAT WEARING AUNTIE

How's it looking?

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Not good. Their tech went a different direction and whatever they have make them able to stand up to anything but the BOLOs and the Jaegermeks, and most of those are either on Planetary Defense duty or in the Atrekna Contested Zone.

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PUBVIAN DOMINION

Any idea of what they look like yet?

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Nothing firm. Mostly we've got some XNA scraped from disabled or destroyed vehicles.

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RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Brr. XNA creatures are weird.

Are they still refusing to communicate?

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

We know they can communicate, they just don't want to. They have communication with themselves, and we've been able to ID that they do use UHF band communications between military units.

We've been able to disrupt their attacks by jamming the VHF and UHF bands.

Once you disrupt their communications, their attacks go to shit, so there's that.

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HAT WEARING AUNTIE

What about their stellar assets?

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

They don't use standard stellar formations or attack matrices, but it looks like they might be learning. They've tried moving up their heavier starships to cover for their lighter ships, probably in hopes of taking the C+ cannon shots on the heavier ship's shields.

But we just shoot through the formation and blow up the lighter ships first.

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TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

Who are we talking about?

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MANTID FREE WORLDS

Species 138.

They're fairly new on the scene. Last eight months. They're coming in from the Perseus Arm.

They've hit the anti-coreward systems on the boundaries of the Confederacy's territory.

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ALKTAK SOARING WORLDS

Wait, we're under attack from someone else?

But we're not done with this war!

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PUBVIAN DOMINION

Because we're at war means others feel free to jump us.

Are they baryonic or not?

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

They're bayonic. Thank the Digital Omnimessiah.

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TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

But what are you going to do about these other guys. Species 138? I mean, aren't you guys almost defenseless?

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HAT WEARING AUNTIE

No.

We've got a lot of military forces held back and were training up replacements for the casualties incurred in the Terran Xenocide Event.

They just surprised us.

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TUKNA'RN RACIAL OPINIONS

How?

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

It looks like they hit a few colony worlds, grabbed a few ships, made some decisions based on the data. There's been some incursions, but beyond moving the alert stage up by a tic or two, there wasn't really any reaction.

Ships would drop in out by the Oort Cloud, past the resonance zone, sit there for an hour or so, watching what was coming at them, then jump out.

They were using dual jump-core models, so that even when they jump right in, they've got a charged jump-core ready to go.

They're using jump-space.

It also looks like they either chose to disregard the data or believe it's fake about how big the Confederacy is.

We're over 120,000 stellar systems still populated.

Of course, that's not counting the 30K or so Terran Tomb Worlds.

They've made some lighting fast attacks, usually hitting lightly defended worlds, and are digging in.

They probably think they can handle a protracted fight.

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RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

They aren't the only problems though.

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TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

Like what?

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HAT WEARING AUNTIE

There's about two dozen species at the edge of Terran Space. Most of them had learned to back off real quick once TDH put a fist in their face a couple of times. They didn't want to be part of the Confederacy. Most of them dream about destroying and conquering the Confederacy.

Now that TDH is gone, they've been moving in on the Tomb Worlds.

To be honest, it's still under discussion whether or not to try to hold onto those worlds or let them go.

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PUBVIAN DOMINION

Not to mention, someone's using phasic gates to move millions of Atrekna servitor species members into Tomb Worlds the last few months.

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Nature abhors a vacuum.

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LEEBAW CONTEMPLATION POOL

But what if the Terrans come back? Won't they want their worlds back?

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Then these new guys, coming in from the other galactic arm, they want a piece.

Their tech went a different direction, but we're winning more than we're losing, and that means we're getting wreckage and collecting up enemy dead. We're getting battle experience against them.

They say that dead men tell no tales, but that's wrong.

The dead are downright gossips if you know what you're doing.

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TUKNA'RN RACIAL OPINIONS

Once you understand their doctrine they can be defeated.

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HAT WEARING AUNTIE

Precisely.

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TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

So, you think you'll force them back?

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

That, we're sure of. It might take a few years, depending on just how much material they're willing to commit to this fight, but we'll force them back.

The big one, though, is we have to make a decision.

They haven't used planet crackers or nova-sparks, so right now those are off the table.

They use a gate system to get their forces on the ground, and their ground forces are primarily unpowered-infantry and armored vehicles. Their ships are lightly armored, but their shielding is really effective.

I'd put their shield technology slightly inferior to the Dovians.

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HESSTLAN CYBERBURROW

What decision?

You said you have to make a decision.

What?

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PUBVIAN DOMINION

OK, it's not just good enough to push them out of your territory. They'll just think they're clever, hiding in the bushes, and rearming. They'll think you can't touch them, that they can just hide in their little pillow fort and keep rearming and attacking. They'll keep doing it unless you take steps.

You have to go to them. Take the fight to their home systems.

Break the will of their civilian populace to support their leaders that support the war. Disrupt their government. Destroy their infrastructure. Put them on the defensive and hammer them to the brink.

Then you ask if they're ready to talk.

These guys aren't willing to talk to us.

That's because they think they have the upper hand. They think they're in a position of power, so they don't have to talk.

To get through that, you have to take some of their planets away. Take away some of their population, resources, and infrastructure.

Meet force with force.

Start to occupy their systems. Seize their resources, of which their citizens are part of the resource matrices. Show them that you can carry the fight to them and take away their stuff too.

Once you do that, they'll either come to the bargaining table...

...or you 1% Line them and hope that in 400 years they're ready to be reasonable.

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

We know this species can communicate. We know they use wavelengths we can interact on.

Hell, we managed to break their battle encryption and frequency hopping algorithm on the last stellar system assault, so now we're going over all the recordings of the past battles and decoding their speech. They use audio speech. It might have pheromone, body language, or psychic accentuations, but they primarily use audio speech.

Which means they can talk to us, they just won't talk to us.

Without having Rosetta on it or a lexicon, though, it'll be tough to translate.

But we're still working on cracking the databases on their destroyed ships hoping to find a lexicon. They obviously understand our speech, so there has to be a translation program somewhere. They've obviously got a superiority problem because none of their computer cores, which use standard molycircs, had security charges.

That means they doubted that anyone could take their ships, or if they did, could break the encryption.

Or they just don't care.

Not going to make too many assumptions. Just, that for some reason, their computer cores aren't security charged and don't have a false system wrapping them.

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TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

So how are they even standing up against our forces?

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HAT WEARING AUNTIE

Trea, you wanna take this?

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TREANA'AD HIVE SYSTEMS

They've got a two-fold defensive system beyond their armor, which is just obsolete neutronium.

The first is a prismatic kaleidoscope looking shield. Now, that appearance may just be a byproduct of their actual shielding, but it works to deflect, attenuate, and disperse directed energy weapons up to hellbore rounds.

The second is obviously some kind of inertia compensator spinoff. It's able to absorb or re/deflect kinetic and inertial force up to a point, then the system overloads and collapses. After that, it's just solid neutronium armor, not even layered composites, with a single superconductor coating.

This suggests that, like most of us before encountering Terrans, they've mainly faced directed energy weapons on the battlefield.

Their primary weaponry is directed energy beams. They also use dimensional folding at the terminus point of one type of beam strike. We're still trying to figure out that beam weapon.

They've got almost no artillery, rocket systems, close air support, anti-air systems, counter-battery or point defense systems. Their infantry is only lightly armored. No power armor, no loading frames. Small arms are lasers and plasma weapons, low wattage. They don't use robotic drones, everything is crewed.

They depend on what we would consider light and medium armored units and infantry. Their armored units use standard H3 fusion reactors. They only use Type-III and Type-IX superconductor.

Their starships use standard reactionless thrust systems. They also use, according to the jumpspace flare profiles, the lower jumpspace bands.

They use technological gating, likely related to the dimensional folding terminal attack, to go from their stellar assets to ground-side. They also don't bother with orbital strikes.

They're just arriving in overwhelming numbers, hitting lightly defended systems out on the outer rim. They aren't killing civilians, they're largely existing to the side, with the civilians confined to the major metropolises. They're strip mining the asteroid belts, mining the gas giants, and performing agriculture.

No xeno-forming on the ecology.

Yet.

However, they haven't been seen since the Phasic Shade Incident, so they might not be back if all they can use is the lower jumpspace bands.

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TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

Well, jumpspace is haunted now.

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PUBVIAN DOMINION

Not to mention we're seeing what looks like Hellspace eroding into the lower jumpspace and hyperspace bands.

If it is the Atrekna machination we believe it is, either the system is running without them or the program is still manned.

Either way, we've got to figure out how to handle that and the jump/hyperspace phasic shade infestation.

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ALKTAK SOARING WORLDS

And here I was hoping with the end of the Atrekna-Confederacy War, we'd have peace.

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HAT WEARING AUNTIE

We have it good.

People want that.

And they're willing to take it.

That's why the clock has never moved past 93 days.

I'm sorry.

It's just the way it is.

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[The Universe Liked That]