Cry not for your own loss.

Your tears are worth more for nurturing others.

Fear not the coming of your own dark.

Your light shines eternal for those around you.

Let not despair drag you down.

Your friends will come to help you float.

Have not suffering in your heart.

Rage against your oppressors.

Be not the voice of gloom.

Your will shall see greatness done.

Friendship's Lament.

For my best friend, Mister MewMew.

-- Truba'an Limberton, 3rd Grade Poetry Class, post Second Invasion of Hesstla, as submitted by teacher u/gartral to the Hesstlan War Survivor's Poetry Contest (Eighth Place Winner)

Max angled for another shot on the crystalline structures trying to get close to the stellar mass, double checking in his 'peripheral' vision the status of the stellar stabilizers. They were an older model, usually used to give a world a few extra weeks to evacuate, mainly a humanitarian relief model, but it was what he had templates for in his creation engines. They were deep in the stellar mass, slowed down by how thick the plasma was and the gravitational pressure.

But plenty deep.

His targeting systems beeped and he stomped the lever.

Reality around him shattered like a mirror with a brick thrown through it, reflections shining as the pieces rotated slowly, the larger pieces showing reflections of Max in the crash cradle, in a captain's chair, laying on the floor, embedded in the wall as a cyborg. The larger pieces began to shatter into smaller pieces.

The front of his ship suddenly was covered in neon-green flames that had tongues of fire shaped like nude dancing Rigellian females.

The flame suddenly sucked into the ship's hull, leaving the green dancers behind.

The mirror shattered repeatedly, closing in on the crystalline structure.

The Atrekna onboard had moments to try to strengthen the phasic shielding, to add their own psychic power to the huge crystal constructs.

It didn't help.

The round didn't hit square, catching the 'bottom' of the crystalline fortress, ripping away the metal and polished stone in a fan of destruction six miles wide at the start and a mile wide at the far side, the crater ripping two miles deep into the structure.

The ship survived, but the speed dropped.

On the fortress ship, the size of a large island, slavespawn pools and slavespawn storage areas were wiped away, ripped out of the ship's structure or compacted into millimeter thick layers of alloy. The edges of the crater glowed white for a long moment, no air or any other medium to carry away the heat through molecular energy leveling.

Max heard the beeping and could feel the cracked ribs.

Hell of weapon, but the Happy Trader isn't built for it, Max thought, checking the damage control readouts.

The superstring compressor cannon had jumped the tracks, the recoil buffer system had cracked and been smashed to ruin. The keel had warped slightly and deck plates were buckled everywhere around the massive cannon.

Max took it out of the firing queue and began heating up the other one.

He glanced at the scanner readouts of the planets.

Heavy ground fire engaging the Atrekna landing forces. The orbital station around one planet kept appearing and disappearing to his sensors. Orbital defense cannons groundside were pounding on the Atrekna ships, which were firing back.

Both planets were taking a pasting, but it looked to Max like the one broadcasting a Confederate Armed Services ID number was handling the insertions better than the other one.

A flare of atomic detonations on the one with the Confed ID caught his attention. He wasn't sure what caused a rippling burst of spaced 40+ kt atomic detonations, but having seen the horrors the Atrekna could inflict and just how strong their Dwellerspawn was, he was pretty sure someone had just taken out or tried to take out some of the Atrekna heavies.

His systems beeped and he pulled his attention back to the ships in front of him. The 'minefield' of organisms swarming toward him had just reached the missile pods he'd dumped nearly a half hour before.

He watched as they missile pods started going off. They were short range missiles, normally used for point defense and anti-missile systems, all with sprint drives and rapid update targeting systems.

They were a good match for the Atrekna organisms the size of a light corvette.

One second there were tens of thousands of creatures heading for him.

The next the antimatter explosion forged gamma beams started raking them from space as the 'hedgehog' bursts reached out hundreds of miles, ripping through multiple enemies.

Max could almost feel the snarl of hate coming from the crystalline fortress.

Another beeping let him know it was ready.

He stomped the bar, felt himself yanked forward into hyperspace, then dropped out with the roar of "NEVER FEAR! MAX IS HERE!" as his body was hammered by fists.

"Aretoo, you OK?" he asked.

**getting a bloody nose, boss** the eVI said. **hyperspace is starting to really hurt**

"I'm sorry," Max said.

During hyperspace jumps Aretoo would be in a shielded core. They were microjumps, but Max figured it was starting to pile up in microstrokes for the eVI.

**can't be helped, boss,** the eVI answered. **lots of blown hashes, gonna have to replace the workbois and the warbois**

"Understood," Max said. "I'll try to give you at least an hour."

**roger roger**

Max could tell the Atrekna couldn't see him. They were scanning where he had been.

COMPRESSOR CANNON LOADED: FIRE WHEN READY appeared in his vision.

Max nodded to himself.

Not yet

-----

The Atrekna in orbit around the planets were dropping troops as fast as possible. Between the missiles and the directed energy weapons, their main ships were taking terrible hits. All of the Atrekna ships were venting atmosphere, had debris fanning out from them, and in several cases had active fires aboard.

The Atrekna were unfamiliar with such things, their damage control was largely ceremonial and more in line with handling damage incurred by a slavespawn that had managed to slip control. They were unused to twelve decks being open to space, blast doors sealing away the vacuum from precious atmosphere. From fires raging unchecked inside corridors and rooms. To entire sections being reduced to nothing but twisted wreckage.

To the Atrekna, the idea that ships measuring tens of miles would be so badly wounded was an impossibility. The sheer size made them invulnerable to the typical orbital fire, the thickness of their battlescreens should have protected them. Sheer size and mass should have protected the Atrekna themselves, who were deep inside the ships, relying on slavespawn for the outer sections.

Impossibility proved itself possible as the ground fire lashed into the ships and Atrekna found themselves among slavespawn in the killed and wounded.

A wounded Atrekna normally fell victim to the unwounded, dragged away and implanted with larvae, killed, or used for experimentation.

Now there were hundreds of wounded Atrekna, many with critical jobs in locations that had suffered damage or were crippled by damage to other sections.

Even the living vessels were heavily damaged. Craters a half mile wide blasted through armor and into living flesh. Organs ruptured and either dead or dying. Four of them were dead, slowly freezing as they tumbled through space orbiting the planet. Six were mortally wounded.

The rest kept drawing heavy fire.

The Atrekna began fleeing the creatures, their crystalline and phasonium alloy ships, heading for the planet, figuring it was better to be on the planet than slowly freeze to death or burn alive aboard the ships.

On both planets those fleeing ships found that there were only certain areas not under temporal interdiction.

They fled to those places.

[The Universe Liked That]

-----

Commander Jane moved forward, leading dozens of autonomous warmeks in the Pacific Rim and NERV class. Ahead of her she could see the Atrekna were gating in massive Ohm Class creatures. Not all of them were the pillbug design, some looked like vast brains or worms on dozens of articulated spider legs.

Each brain creature pushed the interdiction slightly away from the spawning zone, allowing it to get bigger, allowing the Atrekna to move more through, pushing the boundary even further.

She knew they could see her. She was attracting psychically compressed liquid acid shots, biological plasma shots, and lasers, all of which splattered on her battlescreens without coming within five meters of her constuctor warmek.

The chest opened and a grav-striker slid out, lifting off silently on the hover systems and kicking in the jets and the grav system once it left her battlescreen. It arced around her, joining the scores of them behind her.

She smiled, knowing that they could see her plain as day and were concentrating on her forces.

Jane sent the signal and the meks following her deployed the protective housings over the missile bays, firing full volleys of dozens, scores, in some case, hundreds of short range missiles that barely had the legs to reach out fifteen miles.

The Atrekna point defense desperately held off the attack, blowing missiles out of the air even as more rushed through the smoke, fire, and debris. In a wave all of the creatures capable of it turned to try to stop the missile attack.

Jane's smile got wider.

I knew you'd do that, she thought.

The Atrekna could see that their counter-fire and point defense was taking their toll, many could see that only a handful, if any, missiles would get through.

The rounds dropping silently above them used chemical reactions to make minute adjustments to their trajectory. Some prepared the bursting charges to blow the casing away, others began to mix the volatile chemicals inside, still others used graviton systems to compress the payload.

The Atrekna knew that the ranging lasers painting over them were for missile guidance. Slavespawn began ejecting light refracting mist and vapor. Still others pulsed out limited EM pulses. More sent out bursts of radio and microwaves.

All aimed at jamming the missiles.

The artillery shells dropping in were staged.

As the ground effect ones hammered down, some driving deep into the ground before exploding, cracking bedrock and sending up huge plumes of dirt and moss and immature fungal blooms. Others exploded only a few meters above ground, thermobaric charges causing eye searing blooms of fire to roar out.

The others had already deployed the submunitions, the smaller bomblets flying out, all with no guidance, no computers, nothing more complex then mechanical triggers and timers.

FOOF enhanced WP and plasma-napalm erupted over the whole area.

Jane gave the 'cease fire' command and the missile hatches all closed.

The Atrekna and the slavespawn that survived, mostly intact, reeled under the onslaught.

That's when the high speed aerospace fighters whipped by at over MACH-Three, dropping payloads nearly a mile from the target zone, the velocity carrying them into the Atrekna t-shift zone.

Fire was an old weapon.

FOOF enhanced napalm-plasma erupted as the munitions hit ground.

Jane watched her ranging systems, looking for anything doing much more than writhing in its death throes, anything larger than a duck that still moved with a purpose.

She didn't see any.

"Move to waypoint theta," she ordered, turning away from the devestated t-shift zone.

The warmeks following her blinked their icons in acknowledgement. The strikers hovered behind the warmeks as Jane's armor produced two more.

The t-shift field behind them was nothing more than scorched and burnt ground.

Two of the heavy tracked vehicles following the warmeks stopped long enough to drop off the self-healing minefield control and fabrication units. The rest stayed, some deploying cradle mounted missile launchers. Others lowered bulldozer blades and pushed berms in front of them nearly up to their cannon. Still others grounded and waited, all systems ready to go.

The warmeks moved on.

In orbit near-panicked Atrekna aboard burning ships looked for anywhere to shift to.

Despite the fact a large t-shift zone was now barely large enough to move a spawning pool and a few score Atrekna, despite the fact that there was obviously combat on the ground, the Atrekna shifted there.

Jane 'felt' the ground units request permission to open fire as the area t-shifted and denied it.

Let them bring more to the slaughter, she thought. She instructed the armored units to wait until at least a dozen Ohm Class had been gated in or a crystalline structure was built.

Then she turned her attention on her advance.

Control the battlefield, control the enemy, she thought.

-----

The Atrekna had fought the Mad Lemurs of Terra and the Inheritors of Madness on planets before. Six times, only a single 'win' and a draw when a laughing lemur had nova-sparked the sun once it had been fully shifted properly and the native population had been eradicated.

That didn't mean that he, and he thought of himself as a he, liked it one bit now.

The other Atrekna never seemed to take the Lemurs seriously long enough to survive to learn to take the lemurs seriously.

Currently he was moving down a highway with an even fourteen other Atrekna. Two Ancient Ones, four Old Ones, eight Young Ones, a standard combat and control Quorum. He knew he was considered the odd one out, kept at the fringes of their tightly linked combat mind.

The road was going through a valley, with thick woods on either side. The local vegetation was heavy with metals that the roots had uptook from the industrial runoff centuries before. The scent of the flowers and other vegetation kept agitating the slavespawn, causing their pheromone signals to become confused.

He slowed down as the Quorum, in the middle of the column of slavespawn, rounded a corner.

The road kept going for roughly three miles, then curved again, following the terrain. The hills on either side had drawn slightly closer, only a mile on the left and two miles on the right.

**perform a searching scan for lemurs** he ordered.

**the lemurs are dead** the Quorum sneered.

**and blew apart an Omni Spawn with a rocket launcher attack only a few hours ago** he replied, with a slight psychic slap. **very very dead**

**they run away after attacks** another sneered as the Quorum tried to reestablish itself. **they fear us**

The whole time the Quorum, and the lone Atrekna, drifted along the road. The massive Omni Class Slavespawn, the size of a spaceship, nearly a half-kilometer long, was in the lead.

The lone Atrekna looked behind and saw the Omni Class Attack Spawn in the rear come around the corner, the hundreds of legs scurrying as it was propelled forward.

He glanced at the hills and frowned. For a moment he thought he had seen a few puffs of whitish smoke but they were gone before he could be sure.

**take the slavespawn to combat readiness** the Atrekna ordered.

**it wastes caloric and other nutrients to do so outside of combat** the Quorum sneered. **we have not established feeding grounds yet there are still several hours of travel to the body of water we have chosen to convert to a feeding ground**

The lone Atrekna snarled at them and brought up his personal protections, using precious phasic energy stored in crystals and gems in his fine jewelry.

The Quorum tensed for the lone Atrekna to attack them.

Missiles screamed out of the woods, exploding bare meters from the lead slavespawn, slamming explosively forged penetrators against the lead Omni Class. Other missiles hit armor directly, detonating with the actinic whitish-blue snap of antimatter shape charges. Huge bands of armor snapped free from the muscle fiber tissue beneath even as more missiles hit the same area, converting tissue to steam or rags of flesh.

At the rear more missiles flew out, impacting the rear of the Omni Class slavespawn. The armor was thinner in the smaller bands, the tissue less dense, and the Omni Class gave a great bass bellowing cry of distress as its back end was blown into scraps of flesh and sprays of steaming ichor.

Heavy autocannons and machineguns began firing from the woods. Mortar rounds began screaming as they dropped from the skies, slamming into the ground, in between the slavespawn, even impacting the slavespawn themselves. Rockets flew from the sides, hitting with high accuracy on the more heavily armored slavespawn. Clouds of drones erupted from what was revealed to be holographic bushes, rising up with menacing hums and darting toward the slavespawn.

**AMBUSH** he screamed out to the Quorum even as a burst of machinegun fire hit his phasic shields and exploded with greasy looking yellow and red flames.

The Quorum was reacting with shock, bringing up their own personal defenses and trying to put other members of the Quorum between themselves and the incoming fire.

**where are they**

**i don't see them**

**theres nothing out there**

**lemur lemur lemur**

**where what lemur**

**artillery attack**

**rocket attack**

The Quorum was completely confused, reacting poorly to the ambush.

The Lone Atrekna gripped a warsteel and phasoniun alloy staff, topped with phasic crystals, and overrode the Quorum, ordering the remaining slavespawn to go to combat awareness, pushing their limbic systems to active their battlescreens and their protections.

The slavespawn reacted instantly. Sphincter muscles puckered and opened, pushing out smaller drones and smaller creatures. Blisters ruptured and large clawed creatures landed, screeching, on the ground, dripping with biogel. Flights of airborne slavespawn took off from where they had been sleeping and feeding from their host creature.

The fire suddenly broke off, the drones attacking and another volley of shells landing in the road.

One of the Quorum flipped in midair and fell to the ground, sprawled out.

Another one moved over to it.

**arise** the Ancient One ordered the Young One on the ground.

The Lone Atrekna kept the body of a dead slavespawn between it and the woods, not rising up.

The Ancient One flipped the Young One over.

It looked fine, just a slight stain of purple blood across the chest.

Its feeding tentacles popped and larvae tried to squirm away.

The Ancient One rose up, slowly rotating.

**where are the lemurs** it asked.

**unknown** one of the Old Ones stated.

**send the spawn into the woods flush the lemurs out and kill them** the other Ancient One ordered.

**DO NOT** the Lone Atrekna said.

The surviving Atrekna turned and looked at the lone one.

**elaborate** the Ancient One stated.

**this was a carefully planned ambush do not think the lemurs did not plan for pursuit we should push on reach the body of water as our mission commands** the Lone Atrekna stated.

The two Ancient Ones conferred on a side channel and the Lone Atrekna felt slightly insulted by the snub.

**you escort the slavespawn as you are so afraid of the lemurs and the flora** the Ancient One stated. **we will take part of the slavespawn and half of the Quorum and investigate following the lemurs to their lair and destroying them like the prey species they are**

The Lone Atrekna kept his thoughts to himself.

It took nearly fifteen minutes, finding out the rear Omni Class was too damaged to move rapidly and was leaving a trail of viscera and ichor behind it and that the lead one was dead, for the column to get moving again.

The Lone Atrekna kept his shielding up, despite mocking from the others.

He had fought the lemurs before.

He hadn't liked it then.

He didn't like it now.