Festellee-482 was a large system on the edge of the Unified Core Worlds and the Unified Inner Systems, settled for nearly 90 million years. Its resources had been largely stripped away and was now just a habitation system for nearly 22 billion beings, most of them Lanaktallan. It was a planet of long rolling plains, wide open cities, and lavish estates. With a gravity of .75G, three small moons, it was a placid gentle place with a carefully controlled weather system and no geological shocks.

The system itself was only four other planets, a gas giant in the frozen outer reaches, and the Oort Cloud around the gentle yellowish star. The four planets were empty, stripped of resources and the machinery that had extracted them millions of years prior, only a few settlements left over and largely empty. It was host to a major GalNet node, some research facilities, and multiple learning institutions.

And a Unified Military Council base orbiting the fifth planet, which was empty and occasionally used for military training.

It was a fist of the Unified Council, nearly two thousand ships and attendant vessels.

For thousands of years the ships had largely sat dormant, only being used a few at a time for training of select beings the Unified Military Council found necessary to train in active starship duties.

It was the what orbited the gas giant, out beyond any reasonable life zone, that made every system within a thousand light years twitch in anxiety when they thought about the system.

The fleet of the Unified Executor Council.

Fifty thousand ships and attendant vessels, space stations around the gas giant, gas extraction plants, construction and repair facilities. The Executor Council used the dead empty planets for practice landing and urban pacification. Twenty million Executor Security Forces lived in the harsh conditions of the stripped planets, training for sixty millions years on those unchanging surfaces in a place where no other beings would be harmed or made anxious by the training.

The might of the Executor Council could not be denied.

That was merely one of many systems that the Executors controlled.

The announcement that the Terran Confederacy had declared war upon the Unified Councils was met with scorn. What could the Terrans hope to bring to bear against the might of the Executor Council, who had faced down the Unified Military Council fifty million years ago over who would provide the Council's will made manifest to the Core and Inner System worlds.

Great Executor Most High Hu'umalok knew that for all the screeching bluster of the mantid that had been dragged from the Council Chambers nothing could face the might of the Executors. Not this deep into Council territory.

Which is why he was annoyed at having been woken up at the early hours.

He was even more annoyed at the fact that he was expected to speak to a Terran of all things.

"How many of them are there?" Hu'umalok asked as he entered the control room on the space station.

"It's difficult to tell. What ships we do see appear as unpowered cold lumps of metal, the ones with energy readings keep disappearing from our scanners. What we can see only numbers fifty," One of the techs that Hu'umalok couldn't bother learning of stated, examining his? hers? dataslate.

"Harrumph, we have ten times that, a hundred times that on standby," Hu'umalok sneered, curling his feeding tendrils. "Put the crews on moderate alert, order the rest of the crews to low alert and tell the Military Council fleet to bring all manned vessels to low readiness. We won't need them, but if we do not, they will pout for the next thousand years."

The technician nodded, assigning the orders to underlings.

"Put the screeching primitive on screen," Hu'umalok stated, slowly chewing stimcud.

The display went from displaying the Executor's coat of arms to displaying armored primates, primitives with only four limbs who's organs were crammed into a single torso. He fluffed his jowls and tendrils at the pathetic appearance. They were all dressed in black armor, mirrored faceplates blurred, with the exception of a single one sitting in a heavy chair with thick straps holding him to the chair. The whole scene had a strange clarity even if all the screen were blurred.

"This is Great Executor Most High Hu'umalok, Commander of Unified Executor Council forces within the Festellee-482 systems. You are trespassing in a secure system and must leave immediately," Hu'umalok stated coldly.

There was silence for almost two minutes.

"Make me."

Hu'umalok stood there, trembling in rage. Didn't this primitive understand that he was facing the might of the Unified Executor Council, who's numbers were greater than the stars? That this was only one of hundreds of bases and fleets throughout Council Space?

"You are outnumbered by many factors," Hu'umalok pointed out.

"I am required, by the Terran Confederate Code of Military Justice and the Rigellian Convention Laws of Space Warfare, to demand this system's surrender," the human said, his voice growling and rough. "So... surrender, or I'll sweep your trash from this system before bombarding the planet into submission while landing Marines to kill everyone they can find."

Hu'umalok grunted. "By what right?"

"Your unprovoked attack upon nearly twenty systems now. You used biological weapons on planets in secrecy. You wanted war, now you have it," the human snarled.

Hu'ulmalok snorted. "The Unified Civilized Councils are not concerned with the ravings of an uncivilized primate. If you do not leave the system, you will be destroyed."

"Good enough for me. Call me when you want to surrender, you mooing cowtaur," the human said. The channel went dead.

Hu'umalok snorted. What did the human think he was going to do, bluff and bluster the Executor Fleets into debris?

"Put the fleets on..." Hu'umalok started to say.

"GREAT MOST HIGH!" one of the scanner techs said, tendrils coiling and crests inflating in terror. "Our ships are being destroyed!"

"Put it on screen," the Third Most High of Fleet Tactics snapped.

The screen lit up with an image of the ships around the great gas giant. They were winking out, one by one, all of the icons, powered, unpowered, crewed, uncrewed.

Beyond the space station the Ninetieth Executor Fleet found itself under attack.

Missile pods kicked off their shrouds and launched straight into the ships, each ship allocated twenty pods, each pod loaded with twenty-five missiles, the pod itself firing itself as a mass-driver round density collapsed by gravitic and magnetic fields that only lasted a split second. The missile's focused lasers raked the ships, ripping free armor, pounding deep into the ships and leaving behind nothing but twisted wreckage and in some cases not even that.

The larger capital ships, most of which were sitting dead and cold, not even maintenance crews on them, were hit by ravening slugs of particles that dropped out the edge of the hyper-atomic band of a dimension that had failed to form in the split seconds of the Big Bang, exiting inside the ships with velocity slightly above the speed of light and with kinetic force that required new mathematics to compute. The ships hit broke apart from the inside, shattering into pieces that began to tumble through space.

Small craft dropped their stealth, launching flights of missiles, raking the dead and empty ships with energy weapons, then vanishing. Others swept over the massive planet suppression ships, dropping mass reactive rounds that detected the ships and powered toward the ships in long lines of atomic fury that normally had to penetrate the shielding of a ship. The design of the round blew a hole into the ship itself, normally used to puncture shields, and fired off the atomic blast deep inside the ship instead of on the surface.

The ships that were manned had only gone to 'moderate alert' meaning a full shift had been woken up and told to assign to their stations at their leisure. The ships didn't have up shields, point defense, or even have the air pumped out or the crews in vacuum suits.

On the Pleasantness of Total Authority the Captain, Urrmala'ak, sneered at the arrayed force against him, listening in on the conversation.

All primitive races think bluster will win the day, he thought, leaning back and chewing on a thick cud of real plant fiber.

The impact threw him out of his chair and onto the floor. The ship's lights went down as Urrmala'ak felt the ship suddenly go dead, the gravity failing, the ship starting to tumble.

When the second C+ round hit, he thought nothing at all.

Hu'umalok could only gape in shock as the icons for all the vessels began vanishing or being replaced by the green X's of completely disabled. Even the ones that were unpowered were vanishing, being destroyed by weapons.

At the 10% mark Hu'umalok breathed a sigh of relief.

It's over, he thought to himself.

More started vanishing. Several of the space stations took hits hard enough to shatter them into pieces that started to tumble into the gravity well of the gas giant.

15%

And still the humans were firing, still attacking. One long attack, a continual pounding of the guns that was turning the entire fleet into scrap metal.

"Bring up the station shields!" someone shrieked in panic.

Hu'umalok goggled at the idea that someone would waste the resources to target space stations.

Right before three C+ rounds hit and blew the orbiting station to scraps.

The human fleet continued inward at a steady pace as the planets panicked. The Executor ground forces realized they had no ships. The govenor of the sole inhabited planet realized that the Executor craft were gone, were pounded into scrap, and ordered the Unified Military Fleet into action.

There were only enough crews to get two hundred ships and only a 10th of the attendant vessels underway.

The Terrans blew them out of the sky without even slowing down, turning their fire to the anchored ships afterwards, then the stations, as they kept coming in, steadily, at .25C, an almost leisurely pace.

They slowed at the first planet they reached, due to the orbital mechanics, the third one from the sun. They broadcast once.

"Surrender or be destroyed."

The Lanaktallan Most High screamed that he would never surrender.

The ground-side military base he was transmitting from was hit by a single tungsten steel rod moving at nearly .1C. The impact lit up the sky, rumbled the ground.

And annihilated the military city.

Two more cities were wiped away, the Terran military vessels till hundreds of thousands of miles away, before the transmission of surrender was broadcast by an Akltak male with a bad laser burn on one wing.

He was warned that any attempt at attack or resistance would be met with complete destruction of all forces on the planet from orbit. He answered that not everything was under his control, but he understood.

The human fleet moved on.

Twenty ships orbited the inhabited planet.

The rest kept heading toward the other military training planets.

The Governor waiting in his office, shaking and trembling. The military had been wiped out without even getting a shot off as far as he could tell, and now Terran ships were orbiting his planet.

He watched in horror as weather satellites suddenly went crazy, spouting long code strings of wild gibberish before going silently.

All six starports had small craft roar down on them, raking the flight lines, the repair centers, destroying the craft that were there.

Five of the ultra-wealthy attempted to take off.

They were destroyed by orbital fire before they made it ten miles.

Two hours later the lights went out across the cities and estates. GalNet went down next. Then communications for everything but the capital city, which still had power. Frantic calls to the geothermal plants went unanswered. If the com-channel was opened it was shrieks of static, buzzing, and pinging noises.

"Governor Pulla'ak, we have a communication from one of our satellites," a cringing aid said.

The Governor sighed, spit the flavorless wad of real plant fiber into his waste basket and jammed another cud into his mouth. "Put them on."

It was the same primate. The same cold features. The same burning eyes.

"Surrender," it said. "Or be destroyed."

The Unified Military Most High of the planet looked at Pulla'ak, his tendrils quivering in rage. "You tell that over-reaching primate that we will do no such thing."

Before Pulla'ak could answer the primate spoke again.

"I have landing forces sufficient to turn that planet into a graveyard, but I won't need them," the Terran said. "You're about to get a call."

The com-link on Pulla'ak's desk began to chime and flash a red light.

Pulla'ak wished he hadn't gotten up that morning.

He pressed the button, keeping three eyes on the Terran.

"Governor Pulla'ak," he stated.

"This is Most High Valalu'um, in Planetary Climatology," the other Lanaktallan said. Pulla'ak noted that the other Lanaktallan was showing signs of severe stress and fear.

"I am busy. What do you want?" Pulla'ak asked, annoyed at the interruption.

"Our climate control systems are under Terran control. They've loaded programs to create, well, something they call 'nuclear winter' and there's a timer on it!" Valalu'um squealed. "They've taken control of the geothermal plants, the research labs, and more!"

Pulla'ak looked at the human who just nodded.

"But, we are civilians," Pulla'ak moaned.

"So were twenty colonies, one hundred and eighteen billion humans. Unarmed colonies attacked with biowarfare. Without a declaration of war or hostility and an attempt to hide your tracks," the Terran said, his voice sounding like rocks grinding together.

"We will not surrender to some primates who happened to discover how to enter jumpspace and think they can attack their betters," Kalka'anit roared out. "The Fleet..."

"Is dead," the Terran said. "You grounds troops will have either surrendered or will be destroyed. I do not want to make a demonstration of just how fucked you are, but I see the time has come for some education."

The Terran added another signal, splitting the view in two. It was of the an ocean. Before anyone could ask why a line burned down out of the sky and hit the ocean.

The water exploded in a huge plume that slowly turned into a red and orange mushroom cloud.

"That's far enough that you shouldn't get too much tidal backwash," the Terran said.

Kalka'anit just gaped at the visual.

"You cannot stop me, Governor. You cannot beat me," the Terran said. "To give you a quote: I hold the high ground, Anakin."

Over Kalka'anit's objections, Governor Pulla'ak bowed his head and surrendered.

"Congratulations, Governor, you just saved over 22 billion beings," was all the Terran said.

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Across the border of the Inner Systems and the Core Systems, the attack played out over and over across nearly 30 worlds, all timed to synchronized atomic clocks.

Without exception, they all surrendered with only a single shot.

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The Unified Civilized Council was silent as the lights came back on. Every representative had watched in horror as Governor after Governor had surrendered his planet, and the system. Twenty-eight worlds, every military vessel destroyed, every military facility destroyed that did not surrender.

Two systems had been able to fire back at attackers that were so far beyond their range it was pathetic.

It had done no good.

Fear and apprehension settled over the Unified Civilized Council.

This wasn't how things were. They were the ones who had the military might. They were the ones who forced others to surrender. They were the dominant ones.

The Grand Most High of the Unified Military Council stood up and proposed a plan.

A plan that would end the war immediately.

A plan that barely passed as every Lanaktallan voted yes and every other species voted no.

But 80% of the Unified Civilized Council were Lanaktallans, as was proper.

The plan passed.

The Unified Military Council was told to carry through with it.

If Dreams had been there, she would have laughed.

It had been tried before.

It didn't work.

Even the most newly hatched Mantid could have told them that.

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MANTID FREE WORLDS

brrrrr

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

What? You all right?

-----NOTHING FOLLOWS-------

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Ever get the feeling that someone, to use a Terran phrase, walked over your grave?

That someone, somewhere, just did something really stupid?

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Sis, we're Treana'ad. We're kind of a silly people since birth control was introduced and the Hive Queens were unbound from the slavery of the egg chamber.

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MANTID FREE WORLDS

Eh, it's probably no big deal. Probably some gestalt leakage from the combat going on.

I think I'm going to go see if TerraSol wants to watch an old movie with me.

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