He had fought the lemurs before.

He hadn't liked it then.

He didn't like it now.

Around him the slavespawn screeched, bellowed, roared, and thudded against one another in barely controlled dominance displays. Many were wounded, most were not, but still enough were wounded that the massive swarm had slowed noticeably. Four of the Ohm Class were moving little faster than a walking pace for a lemur, leaving behind chunks of flesh, viscera, and ichor. Two were mortally wounded but the Old One hoped that they would survive long enough to send against the lemur's combat lines.

The swarm had been attacked a dozen times, leaving behind close to a quarter of their numbers as the ambushes were pursued (to no effect) or the dead left behind.

The Quorum was down to a dozen Atrekna, consisting of the five Old Ones, one Ancient One, and a half dozen Young Ones.

It didn't count the Old One who had faced the lemurs before. It was cut out of the communal mind and, when they could, ignored by the Quorum.

The hill up ahead had large chunks taken from it, the dirt and exposed cracked bedrock steaming in the hot day's air.

From the other side of the hill the sound of heavy weapons could be heard.

Gathered together in a glittering phasic construct were the dozen Atrekna in charge of the assault upon the lemur's lines in this section of the primary continent.

The Quorum released the slavespawn to the communal mind of the Atrekna guiding the attack and drifted forward, eager to join the Atrekna in their hidden construct that was out of line of sight of the lemur military forces.

The Old One could tell they were talking about him, but he didn't care that they kept him from the communal mind and the Quorum, now Conclave, consensus.

Instead, he gripped his phasonium and warsteel staff and ensured that he was well shielded before drifting up the side of the hill.

A set of rippling explosions sent dirt and cracked rock showering over the hill, the debris bouncing off his shields.

He only rose up high enough for him to be able to use a phasic lens to peek over the hill without exposing himself.

A trick he had learned one of the times he had faced the lemurs.

On the other side of the hill was three kilometers of absolute carnage, then the lemur lines. He focused on the lemur's presence.

They were at the top of a low hill, giving them command over the lower ground below. Their side of the low hill was obviously heavily mined with battlescreens flickering and wavering at different points.

Heavy berms, fighting positions with overhead cover and shutters over firing ports, dug in positions, trenchworks. Beyond the hill rockets and mortars were being fired into the valley.

The valley itself was a slaughterhouse. Slavespawn were everywhere, most of them dead. The Old One counted nearly sixty dead Ohm Class, most of which were missing large chunks of flesh and still being hit by artillery.

An Atrekna was behind one Ohm Class, obviously trying to convince the slavespawn to run around from behind the carcass and assault the lemur fighting positions.

With amusement, the Old One noted that the Young One was having little to no success at that.

With the booming crack of huge wings catching air two dozen massive flying slavespawn took off from behind the Old One, some shrieking but most silent as they beat their massive wings and began gaining altitude.

The Old One warned the Conclave's consensus what was about the happen but found himself rebuffed again.

He gripped the warsteel and phasonium staff and watched grimly.

Air superiority missiles flashed from behind the hill beyond, locked onto the flying slavespawn, oriented, and kicked in their sprint drives.

Each of the flying slavespawn took a dozen or more missile hits. The slavespawn's biologically generated battlescreens had not spun up to full power and most weren't capable of doing much more than triggering the missiles, much less protecting the slavespawn. Only two were able to deflect one missile, one was able to deflect two missiles.

The rest of the missiles hit home.

Scorched and burnt chunks of meat, showering blood, ichor, and rags of tissue, all rained down from the sky as the powerful flying slavespawn were reduced to scraps.

The Old One kept its slight amusement to itself.

His phasic lens suddenly shattered as a high velocity projectile round smashed into it and exploded.

The Old One nodded to himself. He had predicted that would happen.

The lemurs had snipers up that could see phasic energy.

Of course they did.

He watched as they sent six distinct swarms of smaller fliers up.

The Old One strengthened the shields above him, tried to warn the Conclave, and was again rebuffed.

They had barely cleared the hill and moved less than two hundred meters from the crest of the hill, down the slope, when hypersonic rockets shrieked in and detonated.

These ones were not directed penetrators like the ones that had destroyed the larger fliers.

These were terrible weapons that detonated in the cloud, the heavy casing holding just long enough after the bursting charge went off that the nanofuel liquid inside was heated above its explosive point. The bursting charge scattering hypergolic fuel into the air for a nanosecond before the fuel detonated in successive waves that completely enveloped the clouds of fliers in only a bare scattering of milliseconds.

One second there were six distinct clouds of vicious fliers with cruel barbed stingers and jagged maws, the next second there was nothing but smoke, a few flares of unburnt fuel burning in midair, and greasy smoke.

**THEY KEEP DOING THAT** one of the Ancient Ones screeched. It turned to face the hill. **STOP THAT LEMURS**

The Old One doubted the lemurs were willing to follow the Ancient One's command.

The Conclave decided to send even more flier clouds in.

This time fifty large clouds rose up, the Ancient Ones humming in satisfaction as the clouds crested the hill and began streaming down the hillside.

They knew the clouds were too large, too numerous for the lemurs to

The fuel air missiles went off in a wide front, the clouds a hundred meters in diameter, multiple weapons detonating inside each cloud. In some cases the intense fireball reached over the hill.

The shockwave sent more than a few Atrekna tumbling the ground and showered everything in hot steaming dirt.

Nothing was left of the clouds of insects but smoke and grease stains.

**STOP THAT YOU YOU YOU LEMURS** one of the Ancient Ones broadcast out.

The Old One looked away.

He had fought the lemurs before.

He hadn't liked it then.

He didn't like it now.

-----

Max had failures across the board. His keel was warped and bent, split in eight places that had been shoddily repaired by having heavy warsteel I-beams welded to each side and wrapped in battlesteel tubes that were buckled down. Half of his missile launchers were down, the tracks warped or the autofeeder jammed. Both superstring compressor cannons were out of the fight, one with a cracked barrel the other warped and twisted into junk when the hardpoints it had been mounted on had ripped free of the hull. He was down to three C+ cannons that could fire and one of those had a feed jam in the loading mechanism, meaning a team of his few remaining robots were physically carrying the rounds from an unjammed feed track to the breech of the capable one. His shields were overloaded, damaged, and the creation engines responsible for turning out new projector heads were so hot the projector heads were unable to function due to heat.

The Happy Trader wasn't built for war, and it was starting to show more and more.

The Atrekna weren't doing well either.

The only Atrekna bio-vessels near the stellar mass were slowly deorbiting and would burn up within the next few days, their massive hulls already covered with a thick frost of frozen tissue and ichor. The crystalline ships were broken up and nothing more than slowly expanding clouds of debris falling into the star.

While that was victory in itself, it had cost Max quite a bit.

Not in loss of life, but in munitions, heat, and mass. Worse, it had stressed the Happy Trader more and more, until it was starting to sustain damage just from basic maneuvers and firing its weapons.

All the improvements in the universe wouldn't turn a Titan Class trader into a warship. They were just built too differently from the keel up. Even the fact that Max had always ensured his ship could outrun anything it couldn't outfight, it was still a trader at heart, with massive cargo spaces.

The second group of Atrekna, these ones orbiting the planet that was not broadcasting the Confederate military ID, had forced Max to engage them carefully.

He'd used his esoteric weaponry first, knowing that the Atrekna had experienced Confederate firepower plenty of times and undoubtedly had countermeasures for it. The esoteric and exotic weapons had done plenty of damage before the Atrekna had figured out the counter-measures to it.

The first thing they'd done is scattered hellspace and jumpspace interdiction fields around, taking his C+ cannons and C+ missile systems out of play due to the hyperspace resonance.

Which left him relying on the slower than light missile pods and the superstring compressor cannon.

It also meant that he couldn't keep lightspeed skipping, since the 'bulge' in hyperspace from the interdiction fields meant every time he jumped into hyperspace he got squeezed by the bulge.

The three times he used it to avoid missile fire or oncoming swarms of Dwellerspawn it had done more damage to his ship than the Atrekna fire had managed.

Max had been forced to rely on missiles for the most part after the superstring compressor cannons had gone down, as well as close ranged shots with the C+ cannon.

But that had exposed him to fire.

He wasn't the only one taking fire. He could see, down on the planet, that someone was tossing thermobaric heavy weapons in the high kiloton ranges as well as atomic weapons that sometimes edged over the megaton line.

The entire supercontinent was a war zone. The oceans were full of naval vessels and at any given time there were two or three mushroom clouds forming from thermobarics or atomics. The islands were hidden by heavy metal laden clouds.

That was their problem.

Max was dealing with the fact that the last set of hits, strange creatures that had hidden in the counter-orbit debris field, had damaged his last remaining reactors.

No power meant no creation engines and nanoforges, which were already running hot and heavily slushed, too hot to bake up some reactors.

But there was only one nautilus creature left in orbit. Everything else was small enough to hide in the debris of destroyed satellites, destroyed creatures, destroyed ships.

The icon beeped and it felt like a heavy weight dropped into Max's hand.

The last three C+ cannons were loaded.

Three shots.

One creature the size of a large city.

Max closed his eyes and leaned back into the couch, letting his datalink hook in.

**cannons ready boss** Aretoo told him.

"Get ready," Max ordered. He started applying thrust, feeling the frame warp and twist just being under acceleration.

**ready boss** Aretoo said. There was a pause. **boss**

"Yeah?" Max asked.

**you were a good boss couldn't ask for better** the eVI said. **I hope you make it**

"Same, buddy," Max said. He deployed missile pods, grabbed them with tractor beams, and moved them out in a spray to either side.

**ready here** Aretoo said. **its all prepped and ready just in case**

"Thank you," Max said. He didn't fully sink into the eVR of controlling his ship. It was too damaged and he was only one man, which meant he couldn't spread the injuries over several people. If he tried to fully interface he'd be overwhelmed by the pain and agony of the damage to the ship.

So he just stayed in visual with standard controls as he moved in counter-orbit of the planet.

The planet slid by slowly beneath them, the sun rising on the edge and blinding the cameras.

But not the sensors.

The huge bulk of the Atrekna biological warship came into view.

Max opened fire at the same time as the Atrekna warship.

-----

The five being crew of the space station watched the viewscreen as the bulky and clumsy looking ship engaged the last Atrekna obscenity. Missiles howled out, energy beams took an entire two seconds to cross the distance, and bio-ejected plasma floated through space, seeking a target.

"Oh, I hope he wins," the Lanaktallan matron said, holding a hand of each of her people.

They watched as the two massive ships went at each other with everything they had.

The Terran ship fired something and the whole station crew groaned with disappointment and concern when a large chunk of the ship tore away from the belly of the ship and broke up. Another shot and the gunport crumpled backwards, the hull bulging and tearing a hundred meters behind it. It fired a third time and the ship twisted, two of the engines breaking free.

They all watched nervously, the Terran females watching silently with them, as the Atrekna vessel suddenly began to break apart just as the missile swarm howled in. The Terran vessel was suffering small explosions that had debris and atmosphere streaming from the rips and tears.

Long seconds went by as the missiles detonated and the last of the energy beams and plasma streams found targets.

Something exploded in the rear of the Terran ship and it began to tumble. Part broke away.

"One life one plot," one of the Terran females whispered as both ships began to break up.