The problem with the Mad Lemurs of Terra is simple: Every time you think you've beaten them, every time you think they are finally gone, one stands up, wipes blood off their face, and says "I didn't hear no bell." - Nu'utru'ulmo'o - Historical Examiner of the C3 Era.

Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd stepped back and waved Shakras forward.

"You served with the great Terran war machine, loyal one," she said. "Please, you can act as my liaison to such martial people."

Shakras glanced at Naktrix, who just grinned at him, sighed inside but smiled on the outside. "Of course, milday," he said. He moved forward and checked his translator.

Set for Treana'ad Battle Click.

"Her Ladyship, Lady of the Trembleflower Estates, Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd, shall speak through me, so as to prevent any miscommunication or involuntary insult, as I am a blooded warrior who has strode the battlefield and tasted the sour cone of war," he said.

Well, what he actually said was: "Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd would like me to speak with you."

"Aye!" the lemur said, drawing up and snapping a salute, still smiling.

Naktrix saw Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd's motions and moved up to her.

"Can you be a dear, Naktrix, and run back and get my contemplation orb? I believe I will have to use the thinking tricks my youngest son taught me," Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd said.

"Of course, milady," Naktrix said.

"Oh, and bring back a picnic basket, some wine, and my pistol, the good one, will you, dear?" Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd asked.

"As you wish, milday," Naktrix said. He bowed stiffly at the waist then turned and hustled to the hovercar, giving Shakras another grin. As he lifted off he went slow, over the gathered up lemurs and equipment, getting a good look at it all.

The Telkan Intelligence Agency would be interested in all of the goings-on if he survived long enough to make a final report.

There were gathered up strikers of multiple designs, several different kinds of tanks, artillery systems, air superiority systems, what looked like aerospace craft, armored personnel carriers, what looked like loading frames with weapons strapped to them, and, of course, block after block lemurs gathered up in formations. He could even see stacks of military materiel sitting next to cargo haulers and smaller vehicles.

It chilled his blood.

On the ground Shakras had finished telling the lemur that the planet was in danger from an enemy that used temporal attacks, replication, and phasic attacks.

The lemur had merely smiled wider, went "Aye!" and nodded happily.

He tried twice to get him implant to give him information, any information, on the Iron Crystal Chalice system. All he got was "No Search Results Found" beyond that single reference of "Planet Cracked - Non-Recoverable" that kept popping up.

"Milady, are you sure about this?" Shakras asked. He glanced at Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd, who was staring at the towers slowly rising out of the ground. "Milday?"

She visibly shook herself. "My apologies. I was just wondering about the maximum effective range of any weaponry on those towers and what kind of weaponry they would hold," she said. She gave a slight smile, her tendrils curling sheepishly. "My son waxed quite lyrical on the training he had received from the lemur military and I paid close attention to his interests," she sighed. "I hope he is doing well."

"I'm sure he is, milday," Shakras said. He tilted his head toward the lemur. "I'm not sure she understands what we are saying."

"I'm sure she does. She looks quite dangerously competent," Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd said. She trotted forward slightly. "Are your troops prepared to defend the planet from the enemy?"

"Aye!" the lemur said, nodding. Shakras opened his mouth to ask Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd if she really thought the lumur understood what was being said when the lemur gave a short burst of the strange language that took a couple seconds for the translator to translate from the lemur's language, to Treana'ad Battle Click and to Universal Standard.

"The Enemy only exists to be destroyed," came out of the translator.

"Aye!" the lemur smiled.

Her eyes glowed red.

-----

Inside the closed command pod, Max had his feet pressed against the bottom plate, his hands holding tight to the bars on the side, his body held tight in a nine point harness. The inside of his vac-suit and the pod were full of synthetic fluid that allowed oxygen exchange and provided superior kinetic absorption. His body twisted and his eyes moved back and forth under closed eyelids as he piloted his ship with full neural interface rather than additional crewmen and a standard command deck.

To his mind his body was the ship.

Max could feel the stress in his engines, two of which were secondary engines while parts were being wet-printed for the three that had taken damage. His whole ship shuddered and groaned around him as he 'kicked' the hyperdrive on, streaked for less than a second, and slammed back into normal space.

His ship bled off the extra energy by broadcasting out "NEVER FEAR, MAX IS HERE!" as if he was a full squadron of battle cruisers from Space Force.

His C+ cannons, upgraded thanks to the Dead Hand Document, were still reloading and repairing, the mag-coils in cannons 4, 7, 9, and 15 having blown out and the recoil system on cannons 2, 4, 9, 13 have sustained damage.

But his former cargo holds were stuffed with ammunition for the cannons, the plasma wave phased motion gun, the missile pods, and some other nasty tricks that Max had picked up and scavenged over the years.

He had a full triple array of hash bakers where his old aux-hold nine had been, all running hot as they baked up warbois using older code strings, nastier code strings, from the Sigma-Six-Septimus conflict eighteen hundred years before. He had a torpedo array where his old primary hold eleven had been, the torpedoes the subspace foam and stringspace ripple designs.

Max was loaded with old dirty tricks from thousands of years of Terran warfare.

And a willingness to use them.

He rolled the ship, deploying literally tens of thousands of FTL capable missile pods, complete with C+ Kickers, from the massive cargo doors that were now layered with hexagons of composite armor.

Max could feel the slowly building anger of the Atrekna as he oriented on the floating crystalline bubbles that made up the massive ships of the Atrekna. They were each nearly a hundred kilometers in diameter, with a 'skirt' of complex machinery that made it all look like some kind of crystal ball on a delicate and intricate stand.

Part of him wished he had been able to do enough hull reinforcement to pack a superstring compressor cannon, but he pushed that away and concentrated on the job.

The drone launcher 'beeped' ready and he threw one hand out, throwing out a handful of combat drones, all of them obsolete by Confederate Space Force standard by nearly four thousand years, used and discarded in the savage fighting that had led to the Confederacy foundation. It had been a very effective tactic for the short-lived time it had lasted before a fairly simple defense was developed.

Max was willing to bet the Atrekna had nothing that could stop it.

As a matter of fact, Max was willing to bet that the Atrekna's defensive systems would do the exact opposite of hinder the drone's targeting systems and payloads.

He oriented, slammed accelleration forward, and flared the last of his charge in the primary hypercore to simulate a jump failure even as his autonomous drones and waldos shifted to the two auxiliary hypercores and started the coolant flush and degaussing on the primary.

Hard on the hypercore, which is why nobody uses it any more, Max thought to himself. Hypercore is good for thousands of standard jumps, literal centuries in hyperspace, with proper maintenance. My primary jump matrix has cracks through the whole thing that you normally don't see in a core until after a few hundred jumps.

The back of his subconscious was helping run the numbers for the astrogation programs, the random number generator a chunk of cesium-137 that the detectors tracked random particle decay off of, jumbled it, and spit out numbers. He was running his next hyper-skip and crash translation.

Come on, baby, just keep holding together, Max thought, ordering up one of the massive Class-VII Heavy Creation Engines, normally found in a super-dreadnought, to dry-print the components to replace the damaged hypercore systems.

So far the Atrekna hadn't come even close to hitting anywhere he was. The network of FTL relay drones he'd spammed out across the system were keeping tabs on the random missile launches the Atrekna were kicking out in hopes he'd run afoul of them, as well as watching the smaller parasite (literally in some cases) craft to make sure he didn't run into a swarm of them.

He checked the incoming mass he was siphoning off several of the gas giants, the ice slurry from two comets in the Oort Cloud, and the raw rock dust he was getting from several asteroids, all from stealthed extraction systems that were loaded with armor, battlescreens, and point defense weapons. The Type-II Mat-Trans had been a little twitchy the last few months and he felt better keeping an eye on them.

The massive mass tanks in Primary Hold - Alpha One were at eighty-percent even with the creation engines and nanoforges running hard.

The countdown reached single digits and he checked the scanners where the Atrekna bubble ships were. He kept threading the data into message torpedoes that he was launching every twenty minutes with navi-comp instructions to the nearest Space Force base he knew was up and running.

Space Force could probably use the data he was pulling in during the fight despite the fact he was using 'obsolete' weapons and equipment.

He was pretty sure that what was going to happen next would make the Atrekna very unhappy.

-----

The Convention aboard the massive crystalline warships were growing frustrated. The plan to separate, for a group of ships to assault each planet, while the main group hung back near the stellar mass to guide and accelerate the sinking of the system, had failed.

The attacking ship kept somehow jumping near any ships that were only moving solo or in pairs, ignoring the space spawn, and firing directly on the crystalline ships themselves that held Atrekna, war-spawn, and the vast phasic arrays that the Atrekna had designed to help take and hold a system.

Three had been badly damaged, one destroyed, and now all twenty-seven remaining crystalline warships were clustered together, gathering the space spawn close to act as living ablative armor.

Now the annoying ship, which was using none of the weaponry that the Inheritors of Madness had previously used, had made another attack run and was now accelerating toward the Oort Cloud.

More than a few of the Convention were willing to let the ship escape.

A problem though, with Assault Conventions, is that they were full of Young Ones, enough to force their desires over the majority of Old Ones and Ancient Ones. This was necessary, as Young Ones were the primary Atrekna command and control and combat forces on the planet and they needed to be able to react quickly without the delay in the Old Ones and the Ancient Ones overthinking everything.

A new tactic, that had only sporadic results when used, but seemed to hold off the disasters the Atrekna had suffered on hundreds of planets.

The Young Ones wanted the annoying ship destroyed. Boarded if possible, preferably catching the Inheritor alive and bringing it to the Young Ones to torment and then implant.

So far the new phasic shielding, backed by strong temporal stabilization (which was almost an anathema to the Atrekna), had held off the furiously attacking missiles. It was proving less effective against the damnable superluminal shots, but those had mainly been focused on the space-spawn genesis creatures.

Too many of those were dead already. Nearly a third. The rest were wounded, some mortally so, and none of them were able to put out the wondrous variety of organisms that the Atrekna needed to do a safe and well executed invasion of the planet.

The Young Ones wanted to push forward, even though the bacterium pod genesis pools were useless, meaning only greater multi-cellular systems could be spawned. They urged the Ancient Ones and Old Ones to launch bioweapon pods at the planets, which still appeared undefended.

The Old Ones and Ancient Ones informed the Young Ones that they could not have both. They could not split the forces and assault both planets as well as maneuver to deny the Inheritor ship carte-blanche to hammer the Atrekna capital ships.

Phasic alarms wailed as the temporal scanners, tuned to a few seconds beyond the battle, suddenly went white as temporal disruption charges went off.

The Atrekna aboard the crystalline capital ships braced themselves.

Hundreds of missile pods exited stringspace, oriented, and fired their complete load. Instead of the primary pod turning into a C+ shot, it instead erupted as a temporal resonance charge with the purple snap of a phasic kicker.

The Atrekna capital ships' shields became visible attempting to deflect the chopped up, stretched, scrunched, and twisted 4th Dimension attack.

Which exposed the heavier phasic shields and the phasic energy loaded armor of the Atrekna ships.

The missiles, long obsolete, from a war that had been fought with such savagery to establish the Confederacy that nobody, not even historians and milcoomers, liked to even think about it.

The warbois opened their eyes, saw the bright glow of phasic energy, shrieked in delight, and drove the missiles straight at the juiciest pools of phasic energy they could see.

A few Atrekna scanner technicians that weren't blind saw the missile approach, calling out across the communal mind, but their warnings were drowned out by the calls of dismay.

Nearly a thousand miles from the hulls of the capital ships arcs of lightning reached out from the missiles, ripping through the phasic shielding, the lightning point skittering across the surface armor.

The initial detonations were directed energetic phasic charges. Overcharged pulses of pure phasic energy, driven by fuzzy-logic phasic coprocessors, that hammered on the shields, boring at them.

Where they held, the missiles wasted their fury against the shields. Damaging them, causing some to collapse, but for the most part, the shields held.

The ones that didn't, the lightning seemed to pull the directed pulses in, where they slammed against the armor where the phasic energy was the thickest.

The lightning had been the guidance system as well as the charge identifier.

The phasic energy that crashed into the pools and smears of higher phasic activity across the armor was completely inverted from the phasic energy of the armor.

Despite any Atrekna that would scream that's not how it works, that's not how any of it works! There's RULES and you're not supposed to break them like that! the inverted pulses hit.

Equalizing charges have never been good.

Even in the Old Universe.

In the more energetic New Universe, it was catastrophic.

-----

Got a good piece of a couple of you, Max thought to himself as he watched the missiles strike home.

He ordered the creation engines to fire up more of the missiles, to load the banks full.

Might as well put what looks like it's working to work, he thought, then snorted in amusement at the inadvertent wordplay. He bypassed the warnings and 'kicked' the creation engines, with sullenly fired up and began printing up the obsolete missiles.

I knew that old Iron Crystal Chalice hulk yard would come in handy someday.