"The universe is not a closed system as we previously thought. Yes, our region of space/time is still moving outward from the Big Bang as part of the successive blast waves that created the universe. However, recently discoveries have shown that the Big Bang either had additional blast waves or is still ongoing.
"Behind us, toward the center of the universe, reality, space/time as we know it, is pushing us forward, with more behind it, pushing it forward. There is, without a doubt, more matter and more space being pushed out from the center.
"The universe is still growing and is not yet done with its birth, which has taken thirteen point eight billion years so far." - Terran Astro-Physicist Research Conference, Pre-Superluminal Drives, Pre-Glassing.
Across the Cygnus-Orion Galactic Arm Spur synchronized clocks all hit zero. Fleets that had been light years out, watching stellar systems through probes, jumped to hyperspace and then dropped from hyperspace deep into the stellar systems that were their targets.
As soon as they came in, the massive carrier ships launched their compliments of aerospace parasite torch ships. Troop ships maneuvered slightly and began launching dropships, drop pods, or using mat-trans to put troops on the ground. Orbital support ships began linking up, interlocking fireplans, and providing orbital support. System denial ships began launching temporal resonance and stabilization systems.
The Iron Piglet Counter-Offensive was on. The largest deployment in the last two thousand years for the Confederate Armed Services. Troopships dropped literal millions of Treana'ad and Mantid troops, hundreds of thousands of retrained and rearmed Lanaktallan, thousands of Telkan, Tukna'rn, and others.
Every system targeted by the Spoked Offensive found itself under counter-attack. Systems taken by the Atrekna early in the war were attacked. Systems that showed a flare of an attempt at sinking the system found themselves under attack.
For the Atrekna, it was impossible.
There were no logistics lines, no buildup of supply systems.
Just task forces full of ships and troops.
The Atrekna realized, often too late, that things had suddenly changed.
New tanks. New strikers. New armor. New weapon systems. New ships.
No longer were the feral units using different weapons in different systems, across the entire assault front the weapons were uniform.
The Confederacy had used the year breathing space to refit the units. No longer hampered by logistics lines, factory retooling, and other formerly vitally important infrastructure components, the entire force was modernized, with the majority of time spent training and refining.
The Atrekna had made a critical mistake.
In their defense, it wasn't their fault. It was the same mistake every race had made before they met the Terrans. The absolute surety that the enemy would do nothing but gather their forces and huddle down after a series of defeats.
It wasn't their fault, even though it was.
Prey hides in their burrows. Prey gathers up in a herd. Prey runs away and hides, shivering, as the predator finishes eating their kill.
Wounded predators flee. Wounded predators lair up and lick their wounds. Wounded predators don't come back once another predator has proven its primacy.
The Atrekna thought they were the biggest squid in the ocean.
[The Universe Was Amused by That]
They were confident that by taking out the 900 pound gorilla with chainsaw arms the others would fall in line.
The Confederacy just squinted as they looked at the Atrekna and their accomplishments, adjusted their hat, and said: "We're gonna need a bigger boat."
Unfortunately for the Atrekna, the Confederacy had a lot of bigger boats.
Each attack followed a standard pattern upon system entry.
The probes had sent telemetry through, allowing the ships to exit hyperspace at pre-determined point within a handful of kilometers.
Exiting first were the chrono-interdiction battlecruisers, designed from the core to the hull for their mission, opened fire within second. At the core of the ship was a chronotron core, designed to do nothing more than put out a burst of excited chronotrons from the ship. A dozen ships ensured the entire system was blanketed within milliseconds with the cascade of hyper-active chronotrons.
The secondary charge, the massive phasic cores, let loose with a mixture of blanket phasic static and excited phasic energy particles, wrapped with excited chronotrons, blanketing the system in a purple flash.
To the Atrekna it was the equivalent of a set of strobing flashbangs going off. The communal mind and the phasic battle network went down instantly and the channels were filled with screaming phasic energy and shrieking chronotrons.
The static had barely cleared when the rest of the Task Forces jumped in. Some exiting hyperspace razor tight to the planetary resonance zones.
The Atrekna, still reeling from the initial assault, tried to get the orbital defense creatures and phasic constructs under control. The slavespawn were all enraged, lashing out at everything around them in pain and confusion. The phasic constructs were reverberating with the discharged energy.
They needed minutes they didn't have as the orbiting ships lashed out with orbital fire, targeting temporal fortresses, slavespawn points, and gathered slavespawn. Aerospace fighters raced toward targets in space, targets on the ground, targets in orbit. Dropships, shed from the massive troop carriers, followed high velocity drop pods to the ground.
By the time the Atrekna were able to begin to mount a sporadic and ineffective defense of the planets, the Inheritors of Madness were already on the ground, adding their screams of rage to the disruption.
The Atrekna were sent reeling back.
The Confederacy didn't give them breathing room, instead wading into them, slamming home punches as troops and vehicles and equipment landed. Continuing to batter at the Atrekna with orbital shots from temporal resonance cannons, from temporal dissonance projectors, from chronotron cascade cannons.
Within fifteen minutes Confederate artillery, counter-battery, and air defense systems were already firing, burning creation engines out from the munitions demands.
But that was all right, those creation engines were crafted to be scorched out within the first hour.
The Atrekna had billions of years of combat, millions of years of establishing dominance. They had never known defeat.
They had no protocol, no training, no doctrine, to handle what the Confederacy brought to the table in their bigger boat.
The crash warning of "HEAVY METAL IS HERE!" was the only warning they got as the ships crashed out of hyperspace bare seconds after the system interdiction was dropped when it was overloaded by the chronotron and phasic energy cascades put out by purpose-built battlecruisers that immediately set to recharging and recycling their Nth-Cores.
In less than an hour the Atrekna went from gloating over their successes in the Spoked Offensive to fighting for their lives across thousands of systems.
[The Universe Liked That]
Max slapped the button and everything went bright gold with a taste of goldfish crackers and Bubble-Up pop. For a split second it looked like the sun had gone nova, with a leading edge of energy erupting from it, then everything slammed back down and reality asserted itself.
To Max it felt like he had fallen several meters and slammed into the pavement on his back.
Still, he kicked the lever and his ship streaked into hyperspace for less than a second before slicing back in, only a light second behind the group going for the stellar mass.
"NEVER FEAR! MAX IS HERE!" roared out as the system bled off the energy from the crash translation that would break his ship into tiny flinders if it wasn't channeled outward somehow.
Max's ship came in at a high angle, behind and 'up' on the Atrekna, leaving the slavespawn out of position to protect the temporal fortresses.
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He knew he had limited shots.
He stomped the bar and it felt like the entire ship lurched back. He heard the superstructure howl as the recoil was absorbed and it felt like a giant had punched him in the chest.
The entire front of his ship turned pink. An invisible mirror shattered bare meters from his ship, each shard less than ten meters across, tumbling and showing reflection of not-Max's ship and the not-Atrekna vessels before shattering into sparkles. Another mirror shattered, this one further away and larger, then another, and another, and another.
The compressed superstring slug hit the temporal fortress dead amidships from the upper after quarter.
The frontal armor exploded outward in glittering shards as the round hammered almost completely through the crystalline, hyperalloys, and phasic energy construct ship. The twelve miles of material was compressed by the impact down to less than a meter thick of ultra-dense alloy, in a cone nearly two miles at the start. The impact was so devestating that the armor from the front exploding outward exposed ruined and twisted superstructure and the point of the 'cone' of destruction. Plasma was whipped through the hallways by the vacuum of space pulling it through cracks and rents in the hull. Machinery instantly became nothing more than flaming junk, and everything biological within two miles of the 'cone' of destruction was reduced to subatomic vapor. Everything within five miles was reduced to slurry. Out to ten it was salsa.
The Atrekna temporal fortress ended up cored out like a county fair apple.
The two remaining drives twisted the wreckage and the ship started to sheer apart.
Max was already banking, ejecting thousands of missile pods, noting that he was being scanned hard by thousands of points in the rear arc of the flotilla heading for the stellar mass.
You'd think I didn't see you dropping x-ray laser projecting pods? Max sneered. Please, those are old broke tactics.
Max reminded himself not to get cocky as accelerated away from the flotilla, then cut his drives and rotated so he was facing them even as he coasted away.
The Dwellerspawn ships, smaller than the trilobyte/nautilus hybrids, were all heading toward him, their cilia and flagella glowing with gravitic energy, going from a curved shell arc into a teardrop pointed at him, and starting to stream at him in a least-time course. He watched as the edges of the arc shrank as Dwellerspawn all headed toward him.
You belong to us, he heard.
He didn't bother replying. Didn't do anything but update the targeting solutions.
We'll see about that, went unspoken.
-----
The Atrekna forces coming in on the planet had only seconds to realize they were under attack as rockets were launched from grav-drivers, some kicking in chemical propellant boosters, then going hypersonic once they reached high enough.
The slavespawn ships had already run into trouble. The chronotron flare Max had flooded the system with prevented the Atrekna from reaching back any further than the flare itself, which meant the slavespawn ships had to get closer, to get where the planet had been or would be after the flare.
At roughly thirty to thirty-eight kilometers per second of movement for the planets and two hundred-twenty kilometers per second for the system itself, it didn't take too long for the Atrekna to find T-Shift zones to move troops to.
But that allowed the incoming missiles almost two minutes to engage that the Atrekna would normally have been able to adapt to.
The ships were blind, still recovering from the blinding light of Max's chronotron detonation.
The missiles, half of them state of the art Confederate warheads only two generations back, the others tried and true barebone missiles with profile hunting seekers instead of warbois, all sped toward the ships.
The ones from one planet were surgical scalpels, slicing at the Atrekna ships, targeting drives and other vital sections with the precision of warboi guided graviton lensed directed nuclear blasts.
The ones from the other were simple antimatter charges looking for new friends.
Behind them were the secondary launches. Behind them, just moving to hypersonic, were the next wave of missiles. Behind those were the ones just going supersonic. Behind those were the ones just leaving launchers that had either just been reloaded or just blown their silo covers off.
The Atrekna force took the pounding straight to the face.
Both were hideously effective and less than two thirds of the Atrekna Dwellerspawn troop ships survived.
Those that did, the Atrekna aboard realized, for the first time ever, they were in a 'use it or lose it' scenario. Half of them replicated their Dwellerspawn to the planets below. Half of them tried to withdraw and found that they could go further back than the hellish detonation that had enveloped the entire system.
Followup salvos, numbering in the thousands of missiles, all with updated telemetry and targeting, with real time control, kept hammering the Atrekna orbital fleet, concentrating more on spawnships than anything else.
The Atrekna temporal fortresses survived merely by the luck of not being targeted at first, a mistake the third and fourth waves of missiles corrected.
The temporal fortresses hunkered down behind their shields.
More and more of the slavespawn ships were wounded, began to break up, and still the pounding continued.
But Atrekna forces reached ground.
Not via space-spore method, not by viral or bacterial insertion.
Just brute force replication or temporal-spacial relocation.
But they still reached the ground.
-----
Commander Jane Marcus Prastini watched through her link as the Atrekna ships came into range, manuevering for orbit. She ordered the orbital defense systems to go to staggered firing, to make sure there was always at least five waves of missile systems heading toward the Atrekna and at least two making their terminal attack runs at any given time. She held off on the directed energy systems, knowing that atmospheric attenuation would degrade their power. She devoted those to point defense to shoot down any incoming hypersonic rounds.
She had her temporal, phasic, and other disruptors up, some places so thickly it made the ground shimmer and the air for up to five hundred meters up twinkle like handfuls of glitter were dancing on the breeze.
Control the battlefield, control the enemies actions, win the war, Jane thought to herself. She was laying down massive autonomous turrets with barrels whose caliber was measured in inches and were capable of rapid fire in the thousands of rounds a minute.
She knew that whoever was controlling the orbital assault had to be frustrated. She'd learned in her last fight against the Atrekna, this time on the offensive, that she could 'blur' the terrain, prevent them from bringing in troops from whenever or wherever they were bringing them in from.
She'd carefully blurred the terrain, masking cities, forests, lakes, but most of all, ensuring there were only a few 'accidental' gaps in her coverage while masking what was around those gaps.
A pinging got her attention. The standard chronotron influx was happening, heightened chronotron activity, and visual comparisons were showing a 'wavering and shimmering' to the air like a mirage.
She didn't pause setting up the rapid fire shard cannons as she watched what happened next.
Ohm class Dwellerspawn and their attendant units, hundreds of the huge insects, suddenly appeared in the cleared area. She saw the phasic flare of an Atrekna leadership crystalline control pod appear.
Before the Atrekna or Dwellerspawn could do anything their presence set off the trigger.
The entire area vanished in a rippling interlocked set of 45 kiloton nuclear land mines going off.
If there's any of you left, you ain't happy about it, Jane thought to herself. She saw the 'feeder' was already preparing to reseed the drop point and the autoturrets already pinging the dust cloud for anything larger than a duck.
There wasn't.
She went back to building the point defense shard cannon systems.
-----
The Atrekna had fought the lemurs and the Inheritors of Madness before.
He hadn't liked it then.
The first two replications had been wiped out almost instantly. The third and fourth had taken a little longer.
Now he could use it or lose it. The slavespawn genesis ship was already mortally wounded and still taking hits, with six more waves of missiles still incoming.
He concentrated, forcing Young Ones and Ancient Ones to bolster his efforts.
He moved the entire spawning system, deep in the guts of the Slavespawn Spawning Vessel, to the planet's surface.
He felt it immediately.
The Ancient Ones scoffed and told him to grasp tight of his courage, the lemurs were all dead. The Young Ones mocked him and told him that there were no more lemurs, they had been xenocided and were not coming back.
Still, he could taste it.
It was an odd taste.
Like old blood on the side of a ration bar. Like a brain that had been without function but still lived tasted to the tips of the tentacles but deep inside still hated.
An odd taste.
The Old One ordered the spawning pools to start pumping out small and medium sized creatures, starting with the larger insectile ones that could knock down aerospace fighters and missiles. He didn't care that it boiled some of the genetic soup, he didn't care that the Ancient Ones insisted that the Ohm Class spawn be created first.
He knew that they didn't have long.
He refused to join them in their crystalline mobile fighting fortress.
The others mocked and jeered, but he knew.
He knew they were out there.
Lemurs.
Lemurs could be anywhere.
True, he hadn't been on the planet before, but he knew.
Lemurs could be nearby.
The Young Ones were trying to assist the Ancient Ones in forcing him, the spawning master, to pull forth Ohm Class from the spawning pools.
But he knew better.
He could feel the breeze against his skin as he looked around.
Two of the Young Ones and an Ancient One left the floating crystalline fortress, inside an iridescent bubble of phasic crystal, heading toward him.
He looked around again, not bothering with his vast psychic powers, but using his eyesight, like a common peasant.
He saw it.
A LEMUR!
It popped up, out of the bushes, wearing armor and cloth, a helmet on their head.
A rocket launcher on their shoulder, one hand holding the rear grip trigger, the other arm extended so their hand could steady the launcher as they lifted it up in a smooth motion even as they stood up to a crouch.
They didn't pose, didn't give out a battlecry, didn't say anything.
Just fired the missile and ducked back into the brush.
"LEMUR!" he screamed across the communal mind. "LEMUR HERE!"
The two Young Ones and the Ancient One had time for disbelief, first at the Old One's warning, then at the idea that the missile could do anything to their crystalline protection.
The Old One had seen that kind of warhead before.
He knew it as soon as it detonated.
The warhead popped and an arc of smaller munitions popped out in a fan of thin trails of white smoke with a burning white core, like threads made of burning hatred. They reached the globe of phasic crystal.
The globes were from so far back in Atrekna history that their origin was forgotten. The ultimate in battlefield protection. Phasic enhanced molecular aligned crystal. Completely immune to anything brought against it.
The Ancient One and the two Young Ones identified what was coming at them.
Thick grains of white phosphorous around something else.
They sneered.
The Old One watched in horror as the grains stuck to the crystal.
It knew what was going to happen.
The white phosporous burned through the thin casing around the seed within their deadly fruit.
FOOF.
It was also the sound things made when exposed to it.
Every Atrekna present stared in horror as the Atrekna inside the burning sphere were cooked alive as the crystal itself caught on fire, then the goop and bones and cartilege that had been the Atrekna caught on fire. Then the ashes caught on fire.
Then, just for the hell of it, the dirt caught on fire.
All of the Atrekna present slowly turned and looked at the Old One.
**hurry it will be back with more rockets and friends** the Old One stated. **we must protect the perimeter and the air**
The Old One looked around.
He could taste it again.
**hurry**
[The Universe Liked That]