"The one thing that the Great Herd never managed to do was push the Mad Lemurs of Terra against the wall. Many believe the Atrekna Archeobiological Attack did this, but I disagree.

"Nearly all of the weapons employed by the Confederacy and the Mad Lemurs of Terra against the Atrekna already existed, at the most they were improved or tweaked. The Atrekna were beaten by horrific weapon systems that the Mad Lemurs of Terra and the Confederacy already possessed.

"It chills me to think what they would unleash if truly pushed against the wall." - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

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P'Kank stared at the holotank, moving slowly in a circle to bring the other holotanks into his field of vision. Around the planet all of III Corps was on the move, heading for objectives that were sealed orders until the previous objective was completed and the new one opened up.

It was a hell of a way to run a war, but his own intel section had suggested that doing it in such a way, having the communications specialist carry hard-copied orders that went in a decision tree format to hand to commanders might prevent the Atrekna from seeing the battleplan and warplan unfolding or being able to predict it.

P'Kank was Treana'ad enough to admit that the intel trooper had been right and he had been wrong. He had doubted that it would work, had been concerned that too vague orders would be conflicting or confusing.

But using hypersonic drones to deliver new message packets was working like a charm.

All of the III Corps was on the move. Either engaged in battle, moving to the next battle, or strengthening the logistics chains to support a battle.

In the past, before the Confederacy's military reorganized after the Mar-gite War, III Corps had been limited to roughly 15,000 troops.

Now, it was over 2.5 million.

With the reinforcements from the Hesstlan people, with no outside reinforcements, P'Kank had been able to push the number up to 3.2 million troops.

A staggering number to any pre-superluminal flight society, but in a galaxy of interstellar warfare, a billion troops could barely occupy a hundred thousand planets, much less prosecute a war.

Not to mention that for every 1 combat troop the Confederacy's military needed 7.6 support personnel. It was far down from how things had gone in history, where between 7 to 11 support personnel were needed, but nanoforges and creation engines had both freed up logistics and mandated an increase in other specialties.

P'Kank had also seen that the ratio of officers to enlisted and non-commissioned officers often went skewed in militaries that did not keep expanding their units.

Everyone had heard of the militaries that had as many as 2 officers per enlistedbeing.

P'Kank shook his head to dispel the musings on ratios, focusing on the map.

His initial combat forces had been engaged with the enemy nearly 13 hours, advancing rapidly to the next objective once they had completed an objective.

For the last two years he had pulled the units out, or had them artificially reduce their effectiveness, at the 12 hour mark.

He leaned forward, looking at the Atrekna bases, those heavily fortified and dug in structures of crystal and psionic energy.

Satellite imaging was clearing after the phasic enhanced atomic blasts.

Six of the island bases were completely unprotected now, their phasic battlescreens were gone and the wet-navy ships and grav-strikers were pounding them with guns normally mounted on spaceships. Even the ballistic indirect fire weaponry had bores measured in the meters.

P'Kank watched as one of the battleships, built and assembled by the Hesstla people themselves, fired its guns in a careful sequence to ensure that the keel didn't warp. The satellite image was crisp and clear enough that P'Kank saw huge chunks of crystal, the size of a small warehouse, fly into the air propelled by the massive explosions of the huge shells.

P'Kank turned and looked at the holotank showing 2nd Telkan, who were slamming into the enemy all over the north side of the pangea continent. Pulled down to battalion strength for each task element, they were backed by Second Armor Division and First Armor Division as well as First Infantry. 9th Field Artillery Division was pounding everything with rockets, indirect fire, and swarms of missiles.

That section of the battle was well in hand.

P'Kank turned to another holotank, spinning it while he looked at it with his head cocked slightly. The Leebaw Commando were everywhere, dotted all over the place. He happened to zoom in and saw that an underwater fortress went from spawning out amphibious units to suddenly gone. There was the icon of up close visuals and he tapped it.

The screen popped into existence, showing the timestamp. P'Kank checked it, saw it was two hours ago. He hit x5 speed and watched carefully. The Leewbaw Commando were wearing protective gear, were at the bottom of the ocean, six miles below the gently rippling ocean surface.

They were stealthily applying charges to the fixed points on the huge cystalline structure.

He fast forwarded at x20 to the Leebaw Commandos exfiltrating, instead watching what went on. P'Kank knew he knew little about amphibious and oceanic warfare and he wondered how the small shape charges, barely qualifying as limpet mines, could effect such a massive structure.

He went to x1.25 and watched as the Commandos entered their stealth vehicle. He fast forwarded again when he saw they were changing position, getting nearly three miles away. He dropped back to 1.25 when he saw the Commandos were looking at a viewscreen.

A touch of an icon brought it up.

It showed a bunch of windows in window, all of them of the mines being recorded by cameras smaller than plankton and sent back via phospherance twinkles to the lines of plankton till it hit fiber-optic concealed as kelp.

The limpet mines went off with a surge of bubbles. P'Kank rewound it and looked at the type, then frowned when he opened up the window.

FOOF enhanced density collapsed DU explosively forged penetrator with a phasic jacket. It had a second FOOF kicker.

P'Kank noted that it heated the water in a five meter radius up to 5,000C withing a hundredth of a second then quit, the water cooling according to pressure and surrounding temperature.

Huh, it's 3C down there, P'Kank mused.

He played the video again.

The furious 'bubble' of steam expanded out, then collapsed so fast that P'Kank had to run it on x0.25 speed to even realize what he was seeing.

For a second, he wondered what was going to happen. He saw a few cracks in the crystal, not much. Then the boiling water 'bubble' appeared again, the crystal actually catching on fire for a split second.

The 'bubble' collapsed again.

P'Kank stood to his whole height, swearing when he saw the whole goddamn thing implode.

He rewound it and watched again.

Bubble. Bubble vanishes, revealing a few small cracks. New bubble.

Fortress implodes.

P'Kank touched his implant, bringing up the pressure at six miles down.

He blinked at what his retinal link threw up.

He queried again.

Sixteen thousand pounds per square inch.

970 bar.

8 kilotons per square inch of force being pushed against the fortress.

P'Kank nodded to himself.

The cracks. It compromised the structural integrity and the Leebaw Commandos let the ocean do the rest of the work. The 'bubbles' of superheated water collapsed like 16,000 psi driven sledgehammers into the cracks and the structure failed.

P'Kank knew there were no survivors among the Atrekna in that fortress.

He moved on to the next holotank.

First Cavalry Division, backed by 5th Mechanized Infantry and 4th Field Artillery Division, were pounding into the Atrekna as part of Second Wave of Operation Billy Mays. They were advancing on all fronts.

As P'Kank watched the atomic artillery was launched and white fire blotted out the fortresses for a long second.

His eyes automatically went to the casualty window. Less than 0.05% of troops sustained a registered injury from the atomic blasts that wiped away the shields on all of the fortresses.

Before the fortresses battlescreen generators could recover and come back online, temporal stabilizers kicked in across the planet, at every targeted land fortress.

Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs) fired by 4th FAD, started dropping on the fortresses, lazed in by black mantid Spec-Ops teams in some cases, other places going for inertial guidance, and in some places just going off of warboi optical guidance.

P'Kank looked at another tank, one that showed a battlefield that he couldn't see with the naked eye.

EM jamming from his own forces had overwhelmed the Atrekna jamming, turning the electromagnetic spectrum into such violent has that the aurora borealis was being seen almost to the equator. Quantum communications were being phasicly jammed, the strange matter communications links were down, and even spooky particle systems were glitching.

Oddly enough, the Atrekna didn't hit one particular FM frequency, leaving it wide open and clear. His troops were taking advantage of it, the new frequency agile EM frequency commo systems connected in a delicate web across the planet.

The atomic blasts had first hashed then cleared the EM spectrum.

Phasic warfare was still mostly ruled by the Atrekna, but Second Wave was packing phasic rounds and explosives, 14th Field Artillery was lobbing in munitions with phasic jackets.

Finally, he checked on an uncertain one. It had taken the dataslicers forever, but they'd managed to do it.

They'd managed to 'evolve' the warbois to be able to roam around the Atrekna living tissue/crystalline computer networks.

The warbois were everywhere, screaming, yelling, jumping up and down. All of them screaming "LOOK AT ME!" as they trashed Atrekna computer systems across the planet.

P'Kank watched as Atrekna's entire battlefield network on the NE quadrant of the continent suddenly went dark right after there was a primal scream of glee from a warboi that had been so loud it was probably audible to anyone nearby who happened to have the slightest bit of electronics on their person.

You thought we couldn't see your digital battlefield, P'Kank sneered. You think this is my first dance? Me? Of the people who won almost thirty percent of all engagements against the humans?

P'Kank turned away and checked his logistics chains even as he watched First Wave go to either digging in or mounting vehicles. He knew, from experience, that a few hours of sleep wouldn't return those troopers to 100%, but when the battle is on you took what rest you could.

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The Atrekna were having, to put it mildly, a 'very bad day.'

They had tested the enemy for nearly three years and found them to be reactive, rather than proactive, with limited ability to adapt or improve. True, the enemy could fight, and fight hard, but the Atrekna knew that they would be victorious.

Had they not beaten the Herd Lords and the Hive Lords? Had they not proved the superiority of their communal mind over the Herd Lord's herd mind and the Hive Lord's hive mind?

The new enemy, the ferals, had no such thing. No communal mind, no delicate and sublime weaving of thoughts through phasic energy. They were alone in their minds, they had to use crude, slow, and inaccurate audible sounds or visible written runes to communicate.

The Atrekna knew they would be victorious, and had slowly grown their presence. They had established fortresses, temporal gateway zones, and brought in more and more military presence.

True, the ferals were tenacious, but the Atrekna knew that ferals tired rapidly, unable to achieve unity of purpose.

The hated ship in orbit had suffered a malfunction and no longer rained hellfire down the planet, making it safe to gate in more and more troops.

They had finally been ready and launched their attack.

They established thirty-two temporal zones, bringing in slavespawn, war machines, and, of course, Atrekna themselves.

The ferals had fallen back from the might of the Atrekna.

Then the gates were established and the Atrekna rejoiced as much as a cold logic driven people could. A cold satisfaction, a cold verification of purpose.

The Atrekna knew victory was at hand. They had finally managed to bring in enough Atrekna to 'sink' the stellar system deeper into a temporal 'well' and then they would have all the time in the world to pacify the planet as time moved hundreds of times faster for the system than the galaxy at large.

Many of the Atrekna began gathering temporal energy and chronotrons to shift the system and dim the sun to a proper red.

The Universe Dislikes That

Then the shots from orbit, from satellites that the Atrekna had not even suspected had hit, collapsing the gate, killing untold number of slavespawn, destroying untold number of combat machines, killing tens of thousands of Atrekna, who could not be easily replaced.

The Atrekna had reeled from that, desperately trying to recover. Most fled to the fortresses to regroup and recover.

The ferals had suddenly been galvanized to action. With a roar they crashed against the Atrekna defenses, slamming repeatedly against the Atrekna strongholds and temporal shift zones.

The Atrekna had been sure that the ferals were low on military equipment, were low on manpower, since nothing could be brought to the planet from outside the planet unless it was moved through temporal gateways.

There was no sign of any logistics problems or lack of equipment or combatants as the Atrekna were attacked. They were shocked by the sheer number, how rapidly the battlefield shifted. They reeled back, trying to get distance, trying to get breathing room to recover.

The ferals did not give them that. No longer did the ferals allow the Atrekna to break contact, or break contact themselves, instead they pursued, keeping up the attack, increasing the pressure.

With 12 hours any Atrekna outside the fortresses was dead. Either in the mass attacks, or taken out by precision weaponry that sheered straight through phasic protections to reduce the Atrekna to a slurry of liquefied tissue.

The majority of the attacks on the Atrekna themselves appeared targeted to the Atrekna, like the ferals had devoted resources to hitting that particular individual.

But that was impossible, right?

Then the atomic hammers hit, dropping the shields on the great fortresses. Almost as one the suboceanic fortresses suffered structural failure and imploded. The island fortresses were hammered by massive ocean vessels and raked by fast agile aerospace craft.

The Atrekna stumbled back again.

In a panic, they opened up gates and forced and squeezed slavespawn through, flooding the atmosphere with toxic spores, floating pollen, and small insects by the trillions, even as they brought in more creatures.

Not the massive combat creatures. Well, not only the combat creatures.

In their panic, they grabbed everything.

They were sure that the ferals couldn't resist.

The Atrekna would turn the biosphere against the ferals, and gain victory in that manner as the planet was xenoformed to Atrekna sensibilities.

Even if they pushed the Atrekna off the planet, the planet was lost.

After all, how could such primitives fight something as small as pollen or mold spores?

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She was High Queen Alv-ah-naya, Lady of Secrets and Magic, Keeper of the Smallest Flame, Lover of the Moon, Stars, and Sun, Maiden of the Skies, Water, Wind, and Earth.

And she was Born Whole.