"Rear Admiral, the Unified Government System and the other Unified Civilized Races are fleeing the system," Scan-14 reported.

"Tell them to land back on the planet. I'm deploying the Dinochrome Brigade to protect the planets and the high orbitals," Rear Admiral T'kik'tak O'Malley snarled as best as Treana'ad voicebox would allow him. He loved the human snarl, so authoritative, so dominating.

Brood-mothers liked it too as he swaggered about in his Naval regalia during breeding cycles.

"They're refusing the Dinachrome Brigade landing permission. BOLO Daisy wants to know how to proceed," Com-5A reported.

"Order the landing. Transmit our authority. Order those transports back on the planet before one of them catches a stray round," Admiral O'Malley said, standing up from his crash couch. Terran's found it reassuring when the leader stood up and moved about the bridge, even if it put the Captain in danger and the flotilla was engaged in combat with the enemy.

"Dinachrome Brigade forces landing," Com-5A reported. "We be fully deployed in eighteen minutes."

"Flotilla Thirty-Eight reporting completion of deployment of Piranha Class Fishyboi Units around Facility Group Delta, are moving to Extraction Group Alpha," Com-22D announced.

Rear Admiral O'Malley clacked in anticipation.

"Jotun Gamma is in range," Scan-8 reported.

"All weapons ready," Tactical reported.

O'Malley loved this part. This moment right here. This perfect moment.

"ALL UNITS! OPEN FIRE!" He roared out in Confederate Standard. "ACTION FRONT, HELLDOGS! ACTION FRONT!"

O'Malley could feel his inner spaces twist and shudder in some reaction to the phantom passage of the C+ guns each of his ships had been built around. Each cannon was surrounded by a perfect octet of Virii Cannon, a nuclear detonation that was frozen just long enough to arrange in the particles in the nuclear detonation's guided and focused energy into layer after layer of viral code designed to assault the ship's computers and sensors in a split second before the C+ rounds hit.

He could feel the firing of the plasma wave phased motion cannons making up the eight rows of primary guns per ship. Feel the great pistons rocking back to compress the nuclear explosions.

By the Great Egg I love Terrans love of nuclear explosions, he thought to himself as the guns of his 24 ship flotilla opened fire on the Jotun and its attendant ships. So many different weapons wrapped around the most basic of equations.

Admiral O'Malley reached out with mind mind, attempting to feel the enemy, get a sense of what its electronic brain was thinking.

The Jotun was rotating, seeking to spread the impacts of the Terran weapons as far as possibly apart, uncaring that it smeared nuclear fire across miles of hull. Anything to keep the weapons from pounding craters into craters into craters until the shots finally penetrated into interior spaces.

Admiral O'Malley blinked slowly, while his eyes were closed he blanket input from his implant for a split second. He had his implant feed him a split second, only a heartbeat of a hummingbird, virtualization of how it would look to see all the firepower that his flotilla could thunder forth coming down on his massive city sized body. He triggered his own personal creation, squirting a bit of chaos code into his brain, a writhing mass of CRC's taken from a thousand thousand human brainstem medical scans, his own personal icecream.exe. It slammed into his implants VR representation and shattered it into a trillion brillant motes that each writhed with his chaos.crc.icecream.

That split second was all O'Malley needed as his mind screamed and shuddered and he opened the opaque covers from his multifaceted eyes.

He knew what the Jotun would do next.

"ALL SHIPS CEASE FIRE!" He roared. "Point defense on local VI control!"

His brainstem was loading the fire orders and he strutted back and forth in front of his crew to generate a chaos seed based on how their primate eyes moved to follow him, how their pupils or camera lenses contracted or expanded, and the colors of their ocular organs or implants.

The Jotun leveled out, presenting its thinner side at O'Malley's flotilla and engaging its engines, charging the line. It was rotating, intending on smearing the human firepower across the thick mid-ship armor.

I saw you do that, monster, Admiral O'Malley said.

He went perfectly still in front of the main viewscreen and his crew unconsciously held their breaths, seeing the "FIREPLAN LOADED" on the upper corners of the viewscreen. Comm-22F opened the flotilla wide intercom, knowing what was about to happen.

He put his armored vac-suit blade arms against the viewscreen, tapping the displayscreen that his crew had covered with armorplas after the first few battles hard enough that the loud KLACK was audible across the entire flotilla's com-net.

The entire flotilla inhaled.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE!

Admiral O'Malley slammed his gripping hands against the screen and his voice joined the voice of the crews of every vessel in his flotilla as the fireplan was activated.

WE KNEW YOU'D DO THAT

The entire naval crew of the flotilla roared out, joining their voices with their admiral's.

The Confederate Navy trained its gunnery crews for pinpoint accuracy, hashed its VI's for precision, practiced constantly when they were not engaged in warfare, and demanded accuracy within meters with even their biggest guns. A gunnery crew chief who's crew missed the targeting coordinates too far too often would show the Captain's displeasure by drilling his beings until they molted, went bald, or had their feather's fall out.

The Jotun, like most others, even though it was malign cold logical intelligence accepted that the laws of physics meant that you couldn't count on precision across such vast distances.

The Terran Confederate Armed Services grabbed physics by the throat and punched it in the face until it did what they wanted.

All the weapons, launched staggered and aimed so they'd arrive within split seconds of each other, driving into the plume of vaporized armor, each hitting the same target, driving deeper and deeper into the Jotun. Successive strikes pulled the vaporized armor after it into the deepening wound as the Jotun's inner spaces began being hammered.

Until the brutal brimstone hammers found the Helldrive and the vast magazines for the missile bays. Repulsor fields failed, kinetic fields collapsed, firewalls shrieked and died as the nuclear driven code slammed illogical commands into them. Deeper and deeper into the ship the impacts slammed through the ravening released energy, adding it to each new impacts fury.

The Jotun's Strategic Battle Housing watched helplessly as the explosions marched through the ship toward it.

The Jotun staggered, began to heel to the side, and exploded.

"Get me another target, Tactical," Admiral O'Malley said, stepping back from the viewscreen. He noticed his bladearms had knocked two tiny chips from the viewscreen's armorplas covering and sent a message to Maintenance through his implant congratulating them on a job well done.

"I will pacify these Precursor machines through superior firepower and training, precision targeting, and the indomitable will of my crews!" He clicked out proudly, looking over his crew.

He didn't even turn around as the salvo launched from the dead ship sliced down on his ships and began being wiped away by point defense.

The Admiral knew his crews were skilled.

After all, they were the Confederate Navy.

The Precursor ships were only the enemy.

The enemy only existed to be destroyed.

Guest Captain Delminta gripped her Command Stick tightly, wishing her little sister was there to smack on as the ship shuddered around her. The twisting phantom tugging behind her eyes from the C+ guns twinged at her again and she clenched her teeth as the plasma wave phased motion guns fired again. Streak-Drive pounding kinetic missiles fired out and Delmina felt their launch under her nails. Judgement Class particle guns, firing the ravening particles of jumpspace matter exposed to antimatter focused in a beam, and God Thump Gravity Cannons fired and she felt her fur ripple in unconscious sympathy for the weapon fire.

Incoming rounds hit the ship she was on. Crashing against the shields, hammering on the the deflectors, slamming against the force projectors, impacting against the graviton fields. It went on and on and on as the ship accepted back as good as she was getting.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

The Precursor Goliath screeched. The screech hit the shields, the psychic shields built into every vessel's hull and shielding since the Mantid War, and was absorbed, captured, twisted by the roaring bellow in the mind of every one of the Confederate Navy crew member.

Guest Captain Delminta jerked in an involuntary response as every living thing around her replied.

YOU WILL NOT LIVE TO ENJOY IT

The roar hit the Goliath, staggering its thoughts as the return psychic blow crashed through its defenses, seeming to gain more rage even as it shattered against the shielding.

The Goliath kept up the hammering of its guns. It had identified the battle code of the leader of the force arrayed against it and knew if you kill the queen the rest will die.

Delminta was thrown against the restraints in her crash-couch as something hit.

Hard.

"Ship breached, deck seventeen through deck twenty-three. Open to space. No casualties," The Damage Control officer called out. "Secondary shield generator is spun up to full power, cycling out primary for repair and cooling."

"Battleship Nyundo reports main reactors back online, primary string drive online, they're back in the fight!" a Com officer called out. "Captain Chiku transmits his regards and requests permission to rejoin the formation."

Delminta could barely keep track of the fight. She knew that if she activated her implant she could get a better picture of the crazed fury around her, but one glance at her right-hand aunt, who was twisting and shuddering in her armored vac-suit, her eyes closed and her fists clenched, and she could bear to even think of doing such a thing.

Of synching up, even slightly, to the Terran Confederate Navy Combat Gestalt.

Deminta's right-hand aunt Ementeeri, a Hamaroosan of advanced years but burning curiosity, had closed her eyes and allowed herself to sink into her implant. Around her the battle roared and she jumped from beam of light to beam of light, spreading out her arms and legs to her gliding flaps deployed, singing to the darkness as she flew, unfettered by gravity, swinging from the beams of light, alighting on the C+ shells and rolling with them to update their targeting, jumping through the shoals of missiles singing their new coordinates to them.

She had been warned against sinking so deeply. The implant kept telling her that she was too old, her vascular system too fragile, to continue doing it.

In the Unified Civilized Systems she would have been forced to leave, to no longer swing and jump through the raw howling fury of space unfettered and free.

Here, it was her choice, not the choice of a bureaucrat, law, or regulation. The AI only touched her fingertips to let her know she was not alone, that it was with her, did not force her to leave, and gave her a barrette to wear on her ear-tuft to tell the VI to leave her alone.

She was from a small people, who were considered flighty and foolish by the Unified Races Council, who had barely avoided corporate absorption.

But here, in this ravening howling screaming whirling madness of the Terran Combat Gestalt, she was free.

The blood from her ear went unnoticed as she hushed the medical VI by twitching her ear.

She was free.

and she would keep her right-hand niece and the rest of her family free.

The Grand Executor Council's men had taken her husband between a business meeting and their nest. Had told her that her husband had never existed. Had called her crazy.

But she remembered his face, his touch, his warmth next to her in their bed, as she danced in front of the thickly stacked school of torpedos to lead them to their targets.

She didn't care that the VI was shrieking. It had shrieked that she was dying when she'd come aboard but the Captain, who understood that an old lady understood when her time had come, had silenced the VI and allowed her on board, had invited her aboard the ship, and shown her how to enter the Gestalt.

The ship's AI, who had determined that the elderly being was nearing biological termination, watched and waited, kept the pain from her, and let her dance and fly free.

And just watched her with one electronic thread of code.

As she flew.

and sang in the face of the Precursor machines.

The Precursor machine The Devourer that Leaves Darkness had done as the OEM code had demanded, had ordered the massive industrial plants of the Goliaths to begin producing more war machines, but they were wiped out as fast as the Goliaths could make them.

Of the twelve lesser Goliaths that had entered the fight with him, only two remained. He himself had taken terrible wounds, each wound targeted against and again, so that even his massive size was more of a hindrance than the massive advantage it had been.

As he watched one Goliath opened the great doors above the middle of the fabrication bay deep inside its hull to release a Jotun. Adding that Jotun to the fight in that location would change the combat statistics by a large amount, nearly nine percent.

A score of torpedos, little more than stealth hulls wrapped around a single shot plasma wave phased motion gun that was surrounded by a circle of twenty missiles, laughed with glee, the warboi VI's dancing and capering as they observed what they had been told what was forordained.

They left their shielding on until the last second, meaning that The Devourer that Leaves Darkness had no warning when the missiles fired on Streak Drives, slamming into the top of the Jotun and detonating less than a second after firing, just long enough for the massive guns at the center of the torpedo to fire.

The impacts blew straight through the Jotun and into the spaces inside the Goliath,

Two of the torpedos, who's warbois were more cruel, shot through the two massive doors that had been sliding back, seizing them in their kilometer wide tracks.

The missile pod had drifted for a while. Unsure of quite what it was supposed to do. The main warboi had sneezed and now nobody could remember what to do, except to bite and tear at the big enemy ship.

But they hadn't seen a spot where a good bite would do much good.

Now they did as the Jotun crashed into the boiling metal floor of the vast fabrication unit.

A small gliding marsupial appeared before the warboi VI, dancing and flying and swinging. It showed the missile pod something, something the little creature had seen through the boiling matter.

Something shiny, something sparkly, something curious. The warboi listened to the singer's song. What could it be?

The missile pod let the microgravity of the massive Goliath pull it inside the massive construction bay, wondering what the sparkly was.

It was a string. A long string. Of sparklies.

The missile pod quivered with electronic anticipation, waiting a long realspace second till the warboi realized what it was looking at. What the fading, but still smiling and dancing flying squirrel was showing the warboi VI.

As soon as it realized what it was seeing, it flushed the pod and fired the drive to turn itself into a kinetic projectile, following the flying squirrel as she swooped toward something wonderful.

Twenty-two missiles and a kinetic round moving at .33C slammed into the construction conveyor belt.

A belt revealed by the death of the Jotun.

A belt full of sparklies.

Because antimatter-thorium fusion reactors were kept warm.

The missiles hit the reactors.

The kinetic round hit the antimatter-thorium storage at .33C almost dead center of the Goliath as the singing dancing flying squirrel kissed the VI's forehead weakly and laid down to sleep.

The Goliath vanished in a boiling maelstrom of liberated molecules.

On the bridge of his flagship Admiral Yamamoto smiled as the expanding halo washed over the smaller ships, consuming them.

He ordered his comm section to send the line of code he had been waiting to send.

The Devourer that Leaves Darkness received an feral intelligence signal.

NOW YOU ARE ALONE

ALONE YOU SHALL DIE

Ementeeri did not as her soul flew free.