"No matter how bad things have gotten, I always knew things could be worse, and I was thankful for that small comfort even when I was laying there, bleeding out in a ditch," - Unknown, Resource Conflict Wars, Terra, Pre-Glassing

"No matter how hard I worked I seemed to only get further in debt. Unflavored nutripaste, paper clothing, no luxuries, no real amenities. I had a one room domicile, slept on the floor with a discarded aerogel cloth as a blanket, took public transport. It didn't matter. Every work shift only put me further in debt no matter how hard I worked. I knew I could never have children, never had a family, and lived in fear the Genetic Bonding Authority would pair-bond me with someone to share my poverty."

"So ask me again why I joined the Confederate Military after the Mad Lemurs of Terra shed buckets of blood to keep my world free from the Precursor Autonomous War Machines," SFC Thelbree Mentilan, Hesstlan Volunteer, 2nd Armor Division (New Blood), Post C-3.

"Meh, I've had worse," CPL Roger Mary Thres.Tin, 19th Rifle Guards, Second Hesstla Campaign, referencing the loss of both legs to an Atrekna semi-autonomous mobile land mine.

On the planets auto-drills kept grinding self-deploying shelter cores into the ground. On one planet the Planetary Director, who had been busy getting drunk in her office for three days and cruising Gal-Net and Sol-Net for the most debauched pornography she could find, slurringly gave the orders to file toward the shelters that were deploying.

She tried to get her blurred vision to focus on where it was all coming from, but without any satellites, the only thing her maps showed were just a nature preserve on the coast that was being left to "return to nature" for the next two thousand years.

The shelters were coming in on hypersonic rockets that would suddenly brake and slam into the ground before digging down and deploying underground.

Her Chief of Security had tried to explain to the naked Planetary Director, standing in front of a weird porn involving six greenies and an appliance store after dark, that the shelters could hold five hundred people and were quite comfortable.

She had just waved her hand, slurringly ordered everyone into the nearest deployed shelters, and gone back to doing shots of Rigellian whiskey and watching the weirdest stuff she could get by playing something called Gal-Porn-Tube Suicide. You used a translator to translate five random words in Galactic Unified Standard to Confederate Standard then back again four times, then used the gibberish in Gal-Porn-Tube search.

Then you watched the video.

It wasn't erotic, it wasn't stimulating, but it, combined with the whiskey, was better than just chewing her claws down to the flesh waiting for the Atrekna to kill them off.

When she passed out her security detail picked her up and carried her to the nearest shelter.

After stopping by a hose and spraying her off.

Not that Commander Jane Marcus Prastini knew any of that. All she knew is that she was producing more shelters from factories that were on the second choice of the priority construction queue. The amount of resources pouring in was increasing with the discovery of crude oil beneath the bedrock of the bay, which meant her ability to manufacture equipment to increase her manufacturing was rising.

She was producing 5,687 auto-deploying shelters per second and rising. Once the population had a 15% redundancy on the shelters, the shelters fabricators would switch to vehicles.

Jane estimated it would be less then 15 hours until the shelters were completely finished. In the meantime, she would have deployed nearly 25,000 shelter fabricators, hypersonic delivery system fabricators, and more.

When her Mobile Command and Construction Unit had completed, she had possessed nothing more than two creation engines and a super-heavy vehicle construction bay.

Now she had literally miles of extraction facilities, refining facilities, manufacturing facilities, cloning banks, and storage depots.

Her original Command and Control Bunker was a low priority.

The three hundred meter tall mech had everything she needed.

Even as she watched her missile launchers reloaded with creation engine payload bearing missiles. She was using the MCCU's computing power to decompress and decrypt the templates, modifying the templates slightly.

She was at 14 hours since she had left the construction bay and, as far as she was concerned, she controlled the super-continent, the islands, and was rapidly taking control of the 60% of the planetary surface that was oceanic.

The Atrekna might get through her to the population, but there wouldn't be many of them left.

As it was, she was engaging in Rikjaymz Protocols, which was colloquially known as "Full fuck your couch mode" and burying atomic land mines five hundred feet in the bedrock with atomic clock timers that wouldn't go off for a hundred to five thousand years. Under the polar ice caps she was laying phasic bacterium bombs. Deep in the oceans she was seeding mutagenic charges. On the oceanic fault lines she was drilling down and placing atomic charges in the megatons with atomic clock timers.

If she lost. If these small people because cattle for the Atrekna.

When the Atrekna thought they had won.

She would break this planet in slow motion from beyond the grave.

If your light has gone out, if darkness presses in and the creatures within are whispering the horrors they have in store for us, hold fast to me and I shall ignite with a burning fury and we shall light our pyre with such ferocity the Gods will see us again, she thought to herself.

Jane got notification that the first of the major fleets, with battleships packing hellbore cannons that could hit far orbit, had launched at the large islands on the other side of the planet, bringing her wet-navy fleets up to six.

She paused at a strip of factories. She had noticed that the Lanaktallan seemed to eschew automation when they could make some poor bastard sit on the line checking bolt torques with a wrench, so she ran a quick scan to detect any life signs.

When none were detected she cocked her arm back, armed her disintegration cannon, and waded into the factory complex, playing the beam over the structures. The twin beams suppressed the electron slightly, turning the matter into a light mist, which the beam pulled into the hosing underslung on the forearm, channeling it into the high pressure mass tanks of the mech.

In less than five minutes Jane had reduced twelve city blocks into high pressure mass in her secondary tanks. The area cleared, she used the other arm to project hard-light 'frames' and streamed matter and nanites onto the frame.

In eight minutes she had twelve city blocks of high tech fabrication units producing ammunition for missile and rocket launchers as well as heavy shells for tanks and artillery units.

She checked the clock.

14:52:16.32 since she left the bay.

She glanced up, at the clear blue sky.

Come unto me, let us grasp one another, and dance to the laughter of a malevolent universe, she thought to herself.

-----

"Ninety-six percent or more of the planetary population is in shelters," the lemur told Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd through the translator. "We are now deploying and pre-staging to protect the planet."

Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd nodded slowly, setting down her wine flute. She had taken a four hour nap and felt much refreshed. "You reviewed the documentation from Hesstla and Telkan?" she asked.

"Aye," the lemur said, nodding.

"You are able to fight at the viral and bacterial level as well as the larger war machines and Dwellerspawn?" Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd asked.

The lemur's eyes went from cool amber to bright. "Aye!"

"Have you deployed the weapon I asked about?" she said carefully. "In the manner I requested?"

The lemur's eyes began to glow red. "Aye," she said solemnly.

Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd picked up her wine glass and looked at the young looking lemur.

"Defend this world, if you would be so inclined," she said.

"Aye!" the lemur shouted, saluting by crashing her fist against her opposite pectoral.

The lemur turned and walked over to another grouping, shouting in their incomprehensible language.

"Do you think it will do any good, Milady?" Natrix asked.

Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd gave a sad shrug. "Either way, I will not consign these people to the fate they would suffer beneath the Atrekna," she stared at the holo-emitter. "May the Digital Omnimessiah and the Biological Apostles forgive me for what I have done."

Natrix found he had nothing to say, he could only stare at the holo-emitter.

In the depths of the hologram that image slowly rotated, statistics and information boxes appearing and disappearing.

Confederate Standard Low Yield Planetary Bursting Charge Mk-IV, One Each

-----

The lemurs ran around the station, moving things off of their shuttle and onto the station. Four different shuttles docked, but as far as the five station personnel could tell, all those ships did was run hoses to large tanks that had been set up in empty rooms, pump out their cargo into the tanks, then leave again.

The female lemurs were running around in what looked like complete chaos. This one carrying loops of superconductor communication wiring, dropping loops of it on the floor. This one carrying in boxes to open them and withdraw computer equipment that was quickly linked together. This one setting up force field emitters. That one over there handing out cans of Countess Crew Super Caff Blast Energy Drink to any female lemur that ran by and held out their hand. Those two sitting on a crate next to some kind of heavy multi-barreled weapon smoking Treana'ad smoke sticks.

"What do you think they're doing?" The Tukna'rn asked, leaning close to the Lady Overseer.

The Lanaktallan matron squeezed his hand gently. "I don't know, dear one, but whatever it is," she looked over at where six of the lemurs were putting together a computer system, linking it to the station's computers. "It's bound to be exciting."

The Tukna'rn nodded and held tight to the Lanaktallan matron's hand.

That's what he was afraid of.

-----

Max looked over his ship's status and felt burning hatred and rage at what he could see.

His beautiful Happy Trader was no longer recognizable. Gone was the spray-on LCD paint that usually displayed happy cartoons and fun pictures. No longer was his ship tailored to make others feel at ease and see Max as a fun loving trader with a generous streak a mile wide and a heart of gold.

Now Happy Trader looked like a war ship.

And Max hated the Atrekna and himself for it.

Robots were moving another bank of missile pod ejectors into place. Damaged struts were being fixed or replaced. His engines were being repaired. Armor was being layered on. The internal spaces were being reinforced.

The makeshift rooms he had used to carry all of the Tnvaru to safety were gone now, turned into magazine lockers.

His tradeshow bay, where he had previously had sales booths manned by robots and holograms to sell goods to interested parties, was now a massive fabrication unit pumping out missile pods, C+ shells, and harmonic disruptor cannon shots.

Max felt his lip curl in rage and started to force it away, push the anger, push the rage away.

"Aretoo, what are we looking at for time to bring us to optimum condition?" he asked.

**fifty hours, boss** the eVI robot answered from where it was putting armor on the crysteel windows that used to be the cockpit. The control room for the ship had been moved to the center of the ship and surrounded by layers of armor.

"All right. I doubt the Atrekna will give it to me, but we'll go for it. Any luck getting those two superstring compressor cannons working again?" Max asked. He closed his eyes and swallowed, trying to force down the thick rage.

**repaired and being worked in, boss** the robot said.

"I'm gonna take a seddy, get some rest. Purge and wake me if the squids try anything," Max said.

"Roger roger," Aretoo replied.

Max looked up at the ceiling of the control room. Gone were the posters, the flickering 2.5D images from all over Confederate Space, the knicknacks and trinkets he'd gathered.

Now it was just bare warsteel armor with a coat of gray paint slapped on it and a few glowstrips tacked to the ceiling.

He tabbed up a sedative, closed his eyes, and tried to relax.

I tried. I really did try. Only, it turns out, the man I was was still under there all the time, he thought as he drifted off.

-----

The Atrekna Convention took stock of the damage as the reports finally stopped flooding in and damage control got everything under control.

The boarding parties to the derelict Temporal Fortress had succeeded in getting the dead ship back under control. The interior was destroyed and the temporal replication matrix was completely destroyed, meaning the ship was useless for bringing in combatants.

That ship was tasked with construction a stellar control matrix and moving to the stellar mass.

The other two ships were damaged, nearly 12% of the Atrekna aboard were dead, but things had settled down.

The slavespawn were in worse condition. Of the six left, two were mortally wounded and one was brain dead, usuable only to have the secondary neural systems produce waves of spawn from the breeding pool. It could not temporally replicate creatures or resources.

It was pulled close to the damaged temporal fortress and the slavespawn transferred to the fortress in case the lemurs tried to board the temporal fortress.

While it had never happened and the Ancient Ones and Young Ones claimed it would never happen, the Old Ones were concerned that the fact there was a single lemur involved meant that things that had never occurred before were no longer impossible to occur.

They were 30 hours from arriving in place.

When they did, they would seize control of the stellar mass and directly assault the planets, taking possession of them and the inhabitants.

There could be no other outcome.

-----

[The Universe Howls With Laughter]