Admiral Shtuklar had been in charge of a task force of over a thousand ships less than two weeks ago.

Now he had less than 20% of them in operation.

Staring at the holotank, he knew he had made decisions that other officers did not agree with at the time, but those decisions were now being proven to be the correct ones.

He had emptied most of the lighter vessels of crew members, skeletal crewed the capital ships, but most of all, he had ensured that his podnaughts were ready to go.

They were David Weber class podnaughts, gigatons of mass tanks, creation engines, nanoforges, armor, engines, and targeting computers. Designed to be the ultimate reply answer to missile combat. With Donkey Class missile connection units, massive C+ cannon centerfire pieces and hyperdrive capable multi-stage missiles, the David Weber class was designed to finish any missile fight before it started.

With the sensor data from the subspace foam vessels following in the wake of the massive Type-III PAWM driving in-system constantly refining the targeting solutions, the missile could have been targeted on individual struts and welds and bolts if the computers wanted to.

But with a lack of gunnery crews due to the TDH Die-Off, the gunners loaded up warbois into the missiles from the podnaught's massive creches.

The warbois had been hammering their faces against the sensors, screeching and clawing at their containment, until snapped chunks of broken junk code ran down their faces and out of their jagged toothed maws.

The Type-III PAWM thought it would be twenty hours before the battle could be engaged. They were still at the range where even the most powerful nCv cannon would require two to four hours to reach either of the combatants.

They had been inside the Confederate Navy's range the moment they'd jumped in system.

Admiral Shtuklar was a professional and knew that geometry won as many battles as firepower. He noted that the PAWM forces arrayed themselves in a two dimensional arc, smaller and faster ships pulling ahead of the larger ones, their forward line becoming ragged as they moved hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart from one another.

He restrained curling his lip or lifting his spines at such an obvious mistake. The ships would not be able to support one another with point defense systems and jamming, each ship would be an individual against the storm of his interlocked fire.

"Podnaughts have finished deploying second tier, creation engines have refurbished their munitions stock and have cooled and deslushed to optimum levels," Ensign Shugruth said. "Nanoforge and creation engine replenishment systems are at standby ready."

"Temporal and stellar stabilization arrays are charged and ready," Ensign Drugranth said. "System coverage will be at 97% at initial activation, 99.99% within thirty seconds of activation, spreading into the Oort cloud afterwards."

The Admiral nodded, staring at the screen and his targeted fireplan. Missiles for the entire front rank, C+ cannon shells for the larger ones. When the heavy multi-ton round exited hyperspace on impact, it was more a slug of sheer raw particles than a physical object and required special mathematics just to figure out the kinetic impact.

It also required something either built for C+ cannon combat, or the size and thickness of a small continent, to keep the round from punching straight through. He knew the C+ cannons would penetrate through the shields and the armor the Type-III PAWM craft were using.

A single barrage from a C+ cannon array could crack a small moon.

While he didn't have the firepower he had two weeks ago, the Task Force was still Confederate Navy ships, and that meant more firepower than anyone who had never faced the CSFN in combat would ever expect.

"Fireplan locked in across all ships. All ships report ready status," another ensign said, trying to ignore her nervousness.

"Open channel, all ships," he said, his voice calm and unruffled. His demeanor and appearance, confident but wary, helped calm the midshipmen and ensigns, just as he had planned.

"Channel open, sir," Midshipman Wargkwarg said, feeling a flutter in her stomach as the moment of her first battle approached. She had expected to be merely a communications assistant, not put in charge of the entire Flag Bridge communications after the three humans above her had suddenly died.

"All ships," the Admiral said calmly, then paused and took a deep breath.

"OPEN FIRE!"

The PAWM approaching were confident. They had the enemy outnumbered, even if 80% of the ships had not moved from the parking orbit around the planet. The number that had maneuvered to engage them was laughingly small when compared to the number, sheer mass, and firepower of the PAWM combat craft. They had nCv cannons that measured in the miles, not in the dozens, their shields were complex, overlaid, with emitters larger than some of the craft approaching. Their armor was kilometers thick, their internal spaces fortified and buttressed. Their Strategic Intelligence Housings had data on tens of thousands of combat.

They had ran the projection numbers.

There was no way they could lose. The chance of defeat at the hands of such small craft in such few numbers was so infinitesimally small as to approach mathematical zero.

A handful of the larger ships had deployed ancillary craft that the PAWM could barely detect, a long cone extending out from the rear, hollow in an arc at the rear of the ships. There was some concern they might be small suicide craft, but that was ignored.

The PAWM moved steadily forward, having already computed victory and now just waiting to execute their plans and make their computations reality when

There was a massive distortion in space-time around the larger ships.

The entire system seemed to vibrate, almost thrum with power radiating from multiple points that locked down the temporal tides, guided and shepherded chronotron decay and movement, and even the massive yellow sun seemed to vibrate with energy.

The smaller signals around the backs of the large capital ships vanished.

Before the PAWM could even fully run computations on what was happening, the missile pods dropped from hyperspace less than two hundred thousand kilometers from their targets.

The warbois aboard each missile slavered and raved, throwing themselves against their cages, when the sensor systems picked up the city sized PAWM with such clarity that even the rivets and welding seams were visible.

Each pod had a ten-tube 'cylinder' that rotated rapidly, spitting out five groupings of ten missiles, each group with their own targets.

The warbois screamed with glee as they were fired, clawing and biting at their systems as they spiraled in on the enemy.

The PAWM reacted with the electronic equivelant of surprise as the jamming systems activated and each missile was replaced by dozens of false echoes that jumped around, danced, and capered at the instructions of the half-mad VI's. Static and distortion filled their sensors, time-date stamps went off in error, and entire sectors of the PAWM sensor arrays went down.

The point defense never even got a chance to fire before the pods had completely flushed their magazines, filling space with howling missiles that drove in on sprint-drives that accelerated them to .89C in less than a second.

Most Strategic Intelligence Arrays just did the equivalent of gape in shock at the sudden tsunami of missiles that erupted into their faces, above them, beneath them, on either side, and in one reef of a quarter million pods, behind them.

Before the PAWM could completely register the sudden flood of twenty-five million missile pods firing their complete compliment of fifty missiles each, the center of the pod activated.

Putting a hyperdrive engine on the pod to get it into place rapidly was nothing new. That had been theorized even before mankind had achieved true FTL travel.

It was what happened next.

Graviton and mass-drivers engaged with the charged hyperdrive core. The entire procedure took less than a millionth of a second as the mass of the missile-pod collapsed into the magnetically arranged 'firing tube' and the mass charged by the particles of the suddenly ruptured hyperdrive.

It converted the entire pod into a C+ round as the pod vanished up its own ass.

The C+ rounds from the pods hit the leading wave of PAWM at the same time as the heavy C+ cannons on the capital ships of the fleet slammed home on the rear ranks. The C+ rounds of the missile pods were only a tenth of the mass of the dedicated shells, had traveled less distance and so were not carrying the full inertial payload.

That didn't mean they were ineffective.

C+ rounds penetrated deep into the PAWM, past shields, past armor, directly into interior spaces.

Missiles of a half dozen different payloads went off.

Worse, from the PAWM point of view, were the Electronic Warfare missiles. Those streamed code, flashed code in lights, broadcast it across electromagnetic frequencies. Howling, gibbering, ravening, maddened code.

All of the PAWM found themselves suddenly boarded by electronic entities that were nothing but sharp razor edged glass, howling savagery, and malevolent glee. The warbois that had boarded the PAWM ships ripped through everything they could, crashing databases and operating systems, slagging physical equipment, throwing junk code and junk data everywhere. What they couldn't take over, they destroyed, what they couldn't destroy they screamed at and hurled themselves against, clawing and biting, looking for any chink in the armor.

At the same time, multi-ton slugs of wavelength particles, churning hellish maelstroms, exploded deep inside the ships. These didn't blow craters in armor hoping to find a critical system somehow. These impacted inside critical spaces. Armor buckled outward, the struts designed wrong to hold the blast inside. Energy and plasma raced through corridors and when blocked, exploded.

Shields flickered and went down.

The missiles attacked.

The PAWM Strategic Intelligence Arrays were still trying to come to grips that not only were they in range of the enemy, but the enemy could touch them whenever they wanted when their shields flickered and dropped and the missiles came screaming in.

Antimatter, explosion forged X-ray laser clusters, particle beams, and even more exotic warheads.

Armor cratered, dissolved, was stripped away in huge chunks measuring tens or hundreds of kilometers across and kilometers deep.

Then the more esoteric weapons hit.

Torpedoes that finished their runs inside the shields, orienting on the massive engines, fired from behind the PAWM. Superstring compressor cannons that shattered reality in a channel fifty kilometers wide. Coronal gate torpedoes that lanced the PAWM with a compressed solar coronal ejection, the raw plasma squeezed down to a 100th of the size till it was nearly a solid. Temporal resonance and dissonance weapons. Realspace "chatterer" weapons stretched and compressed the fabric of space in a convulsive shudder, stretching and squeezing the matter within the space as the Acubella fields flickered on and off at different strengths. Phasic disruptors went off with purple flashes, striking directly at the minds of the PAWM in a method that previously had been the sole tactic of the Atrekna and Hive Queens.

The PAWM couldn't get a handle on it. Every other battle, every other simulation, had the enemy focusing on one type of weapon, usually energy to keep from having to deal with ammunition consumption, not a dizzying array of multiple weapon types.

It didn't help that the warbois were having themselves a good time in a system that only required single-authentication logins with passcodes only four or six long along twenty symbols.

Worse, the primitive ships were maneuvering, rolling and shifting as one preplanned whole. Even if the PAWM had launched weapons, the speed and smoothness of the primitive armada's maneuvers made it so that anything would have missed to eventually plunge into the stellar mass.

One cataclysmic barrage the entire lead of the PAWM force was reduced to scrap metal coasting in-system toward the stellar mass, spreading debris fields, or dissipating clouds of roiling energy.

The Harvester classes, Goliaths and Devestators and Jotuns, fared little better. The design of the Terran weapons made their own mass work against them as the C+ cannon shots slammed home, Each one had a half-dozen plumes of energy, fifty miles wide, erupt from either side, an external visual sign of the devestation inside. The superstring compressor shots hit with such force that three hundred miles of armor, internal spaces, and equipment was reduced to an ultra-dense band of solid mass only a mile thick. Sections the size of large islands broke free or exploded away from the main hulls.

Half of them went dead, tumbling, the Strategic Intelligence Arrays gone cold and dead or vanished in the hell of weapon detonations.

The rest were crippled. Engines destroyed by fast moving torpedoes, Hellcores exploding in place, jumpcores detonating inside of hulls. Shields flickered and went down or just winked out. SIA lost contact with entire regions of their hulls.

Twenty of them had been carrying full Conclaves, making up an entire Convocation, the Atrekna confident of their space forces.

In one cataclysmic second fifteen of those ships were dead hulks tumbling through space, four were badly damaged wrecks, and one still had power and engine thrust.

The Atrekna had considered themselves ready, with phasic shielding to protect themselves against the type of attacks they had been informed of on the planet's surface.

The phasic munitions that hit were of a magnitude they were not prepared for. Designed for shutting down crystallline intelligence systems, advanced unshielded AI's, and to disrupt certain molycircs, the crashing wave of phasic energy that exploded against the hulls overloaded the phasic shielding that had been perfectly satisfactory against the Mantid AWM's, ripped through the armor as if it wasn't there, and crashed against the Atrekna's personal shields.

Three quarters of them died right there, some reduced to a fine mist of their component atoms, others into a spray of liquified tissue, and some just having their spinal cords and brains explode.

The remainder panicked and triggered their ace in the hole too early.

Admiral Shtuklar watched the results of his first attack hit with satisfaction. Another volley and the enemy would be little more than wreckage. Already the David Weber class podnauts were fanning out another cone of missile pods, preparing for a second strike.

"STATUS CHANGE!" a midshipman called out.

"Report," the Admiral said, lifting several of his spines in curiosity.

"Biological War Machines have just made realspace translation in massive numbers. More are coming in," the midshipman reported.

"Stabilization!" Admiral Shtuklar snapped out.

"Aye, sir?" the Commodore asked.

"Flutter the system, time to slice and dice some unwanted echoes and memories," the Admiral said calmly.

"Executing Fluttershy Protocol," the Commodore said.

The Atrekna felt satisfaction as they brought in slavespawn by the thousands. Only a few dozen of the larger ones, nothing compared to the massive PAWMs, but still enough to sterilize or capture a world.

The few remaining gathered their powers and began to phase in the next wave.

The entire system seemed to turn upside down and inside out. Temporal munitions exploded, the stabilizers cycled rapidly, and the space-time regulators oscillated along a predetermined chaotic pattern.

The entire incoming wave of slavespawn exploded into gobbets of flesh that froze instantly.

"Fire Volley Two," Admiral Shtuklar ordered.

The Atrekna aboard the surviving AWM stared at what instruments they had as the tiny primitive fleet fired again.

Three quarters of them fled, translating to the surface of the planet to join their fellows, the rest died as the second strike blew the last remaining AWMs into spreading debris.

Half of the fleeing Atrekna were torn apart trying to reach the surface.

When they reached the surface they quailed back from the savagery. Feral primitives were everywhere, slaughtering the slavespawn, attacking spawnseeds, creating temporal disruption that prevented any method of adding to the slavespawn in that area, either from the past or the future.

Worse was the cold malevolent force moving through the thickest spawning fields.

A half dozen of a Conclave sneered at the Quorum that tried to warn them and reached out to control or snuff out the minds of the cold force attacking the primary spawning field.

The Quorum watched with cold satisfaction as they touched those strange minds.

Two of the Conclave dropped from the sky, plummeting through the air, to slam into the ground, their eyes bulged from their heads. Two others screamed and attacked each other despite the remainder of the Conclave urging them to control themselves.

Within minutes the Conclave was reduced to a mere fifty, pulling their minds away and shielding them from any kind of contact from the creatures spreading out through the spawnseed area.

One was slow and felt the cold dead hands grab him.

i was her hero the cold trickle of thought, like nearly frozen swamp water, wormed through the Atrekna's brain. some hero.

It screamed and writhed.

The others held back from killing their fellow Atrekna. True, he was millions of years old, a coldly professional and skilled strategist.

But they could sense that strange intellect grabbing their fellow and chose to watch rather than quickly and cleanly kill their fellow.

The Atrekna felt fingers wrap around its conical head.

i saw the black dog on that hilltop the thought was slow, cold molasses on a winter's morning, with the taste of bad meat and spoiled milk.

The Atrekna screamed and tried to push away the thought, the feeling of those cold hands on its skin. It could see a bluish face, one of the feral primates, in front of it's eyes, the mouth opening to expose blackened and bloody teeth in jaws that kept gnashing.

The tongue was bluish purple.

i've been hurt worse the thought informed the Atrekna. Pressure started to increase on its head and it began gibbering as it felt its skull shudder and compress.

but i really can't remember when the mind said. a mar-gite pulled my arm off.

The Atrekna screamed as the primate bit deep, ripping away a chunk of flesh, and swallowed.

so hungry i'm so hungry i can't remember when pulled my arm off happy birthday some hero

The Atrekna's skull ruptured suddenly and it dropped from the sky.

The others heard the voice.

i can taste nipplegloss and blood

They put up shielding between themselves and that voice.

The Quorum that was already there refused to join their communal mind, harshly rebuffing them.

The newcomers sent a demand for an explanation.

One felt cold primate fingers down its spine.

i was nineteen when i killed my first mar-gite it heard.

Another felt fingers brush their chest, beneath their robe.

it took me nearly three decades to be accepted to Third Armor and now i'm so hungry i'm so cold and your so warm i'm so hungry

They could hear the clackity clack clack of jaws, teeth gnashing, smell bad rotting blood and flesh, feel a coldness seep into their flesh.

come and see they all heard.

The Quorum suddenly lunged forward, attacking the remaining members of the Conclave, ruthlessly and without any mercy.

They had been fighting for nearly sixty hours against that cold dark stain.

They knew infection when they saw it.

-----------------

The Admiral looked at the newest targets.

"Time till we are in range of their weapons?" he asked.

"Biological war machines, Admiral. They won't reach close enough to the stellar mass to fully thaw for another three hours," the Commodore said.

"Run the firing solutions. We'll kill them while they're still frozen and half-asleep," the Admiral said. "My compliments to Missile Division Alexander, if you would."

"Yes, Admiral," was the reply.

Admiral Shtuklar rocked back and forth on his heels, flexing his hocks.

Now this he understood.

---------------

"Do we know how long Trucker's been down there?" Smokey 'No asked, lighting another cigarette.

His aide shook his head. "Estimates based on tidal forces believe that nearly sixty hours have passed since he made land-fall. Surface temporal distortions are making it hard to tell."

Smokey 'No nodded his head slowly and carefully. The last thing he needed was another surge of euphoric chemicals.

"Keep an eye out on Dead Blood and First Telkan. It looks like A'armo'o and Ekret have their areas wrapped up, the Treana'ad Hordes appear to own the cities," Smokey 'No jabbed his cigarette at several place on the holotank. "If we keep up the momentum, we'll have broken the enemy's back within the next forty-eight hours, then it will just be mopup."

The lights flickered and General NoDra'ak felt the weird plucking through his ichor marrow of C+ cannons firing. He looked up at the ceiling then back at the holotank, taking a long drag off his cigarette. He exhaled through his footpads and gave a wry chuckle.

"Say what you want about the Admiral's ground combat expertise," NoDra'ak chuckled, "I'll wager you sprinkles to caramel that the space forces won't even get a shot off at us before he's mopping them up."

"No bet, sir," his aide said.

------------

Vuxten leaned against the side of the grav-lifter, his arms crossed and SMG in his lap. He was mostly awake, dreaming of Telkan as the flitter kept low to the ground, heading toward the next incursion. His armor was dented, scraped, and discolored, like the rest of First Telkan's armor.

But he hadn't suffered any KIA yet.

Across from him, feet anchored as if it was rooted to the very earth, the sole Terran in the entire Telkan Division stared to the south.

Where Dead Blood was crushing the largest of the Atrekna Dwellerspawn forces.

"Do you love me?" Casey asked.

"Forever and ever," Lozen answered.