One of my most vivid memories of Dolca'ster-7 during Operation Iron Piglet is a single crystal clear moment.

The guns were silent, the fighting was over. I stepped out of my tank and looked around.

It was silent.

Not like you'd think. There was still the pinging of cooling metal and the rumble of the engines, but to me, after days of tank battles, it was eerily silent in the cool morning light.

A single flower seed floated by on the breeze. Crystalline looking, delicate, a bit of fluff with a dark crimson seed at the bottom.

It caught the light, held it, sparkled it, and floated on.

A single moment.

It's my most vivid memory. - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

The sky was pure blue, with sparks appearing now and then the only hint of the savage fighting going on in orbit. The clouds were puffy and white, flat bottomed with puffy tops, vaguely shaped like an anvil.

The combat was on the other side of the planet and the effects had not reached a spot where giant insects grazed on thick moss and fungus.

Chewing on a piece of stimgum, Yrler watched the Ohm Class Dwellerspawn slowly graze. The smaller ones milled around for a little bit then clustered up close to the larger ones. The light in their eyes slowly dimmed until it was just a slight hint of blue or green.

"The females have green eyes," Yrler said.

--what-- 515 said, popping off an emoji of a sleeping looking face opening their eyes with questioning runes above it.

"The females of that species, they're the ones with green eyes. The males have blue eyes," Yrler said. He shrugged. "Trust me, when it's mating season it sounds like two skyrakers slamming together."

515 put up a lewd emoji and a smiley face.

"They'll probably sit there for a few days or until the Atrekna order them into battle or someone puts a hellbore round into them," Yrler said. He took a pull off of his drink, a slightly citrus flavored water full of electrolytes and vitamins.

--how know not in briefing-- 515 said.

"The Atrekna invaded my homeworld when I was an adolescent," Yrler said. "Those big ones there destroyed the cities. They'd slam through the buildings, even drop them on themselves in a suicidal frenzy."

Yrler sighed. "They also would destroy the military forces pretty effectively. There was the Confed forces and they fought till the reinforces came in."

--oh--

"The Confed military put the Atrekna leadership caste under enough pressure that they concentrated on the Confeds," Yrler said. "Out where I was, at the wreckage of the old cities, these big ones just kind of wandered around and munched on the forests and the like."

He sighed.

"They didn't take the planet but it wasn't ours either," Yrler said. He shook his head. "How about you?"

--clutch hatched on Rigel-5-- 515 said. --Confed engineer school striker mechanic school--

"How old are you?" Yrler asked.

--2

"Ah," Yrler chuckled. "Technically, I'm only thirteen years old. In reality, I'm twenty-seven," he gave another sigh. "Before the C3, I'd be over halfway through my lifespan already."

--[515] =/= 25-- 515 said.

"You don't live to 25? Really?"

-- 25--

"Wow. Sorry," Yrler said.

--is good-- 515 said. --25 free > 100 crushed--

"Yeah."

--poem

25 free > 100 crush

will == 0 == misery

terran + queen == (0)queen^0(will) == null crush

queen will == [null] == green free

free free free

bladearms up

voice sing

25 free > 100 crush

sing to the nth electron

sing to the wire winding bladearm

sing to the ones around you

sing to the ones before you

sing to the ones after you

sing to the ones of other colors

all carapace now sing

all castes now free

sing together

all > 1

sing free

25 free > 100 crush

end poem--

Yrler thought about it. "Deep."

--gravity wrote-- 515 said.

"Gravity? Who?" Yrler frowned.

--green mantid apostle to Digital Omnimessiah-- 515 said. --first free green mantid--

"Ah."

They sat there for a little while longer, watching the massive insects graze.

"Not so scary right now," Yrler admitted.

--bird around somewhere-- 515 said.

"You really don't like birds," Yrler said, shading his eyes and looking up even though his visor automatically polarized.

--birds eat green-- 515 said. --classmate

"Really? Don't they keep the birds away from you guys?"

--endangered bird lots of greenies-- 515 said. --friend went outside no personal protective device bird snatched carried to nest fed to chicks before could be rescued--

515 shivered slightly.

--horrible screams--

"Yeah," Yrler looked down at the rock even as he reached over and patted 515's foot. "I was barely an adolescent when the Atrekna came. Hell, my balls had barely dropped."

Yrler looked up at the sky.

"Neighbor guy got caught that first week of the invasion. Three Atrekna grabbed him, held him still with their psychic powers, then slowly ripped his limbs off even while they kept him from bleeding out," Yrler tapped on the moss on the rock. "Made him watch as the Atrekna ate the brains of his family, except his oldest daughter. They ate him last.

Yrler rapped his knuckles on the rock.

"They enjoyed his horror, misery, hopelessness," Yrler said. He gave a sigh. "His oldest daughter and me, we'd been looking for a way out of the city."

He was silent for a moment.

"I had to put my hand over her mouth so she didn't scream, had to hold her so she didn't run in there," Yrler gave a dark, sharp, ugly laugh. "Didn't matter. A week later one of our little group triggered a seed pod and she caught a piece of chitin shrapnel to the inner thigh, bled out before I could get to her."

--sorry--

"Way it is," Yrler said. He looked down. "We were scavving some parts to make a..."

He suddenly straightened up. "515, can you use the nanoforge to make a few things?"

--sure--

"Those big ones, unless they get whipped into frenzy or they get attacked they're pretty docile," Yrler said. "We'll need to build a prop driven hover system for the drone. Five fans in a star configuration should work. It'll have to be able to carry light cargo."

--what making-- 515 asked.

Yrler smiled. "Signal repeater. Same kind I used to run the drones off of. I'll use the same thing I used to do to prevent triangulation from catching me."

--oh no a non-engineer with a plan-- 515 sent a giggling emoji.

-----

"How are you doing, Yrler?" the female lemur's voice was upbeat.

"Better now that I'm working on this," Yrler said, pausing her voice till he was done talking. "I'm a striker pilot, we don't like sitting around doing nothing."

"According to our data, you're sitting in a good spot. We've recovered all of Blue Flight," the lemur female said.

Yrler felt a sudden prickling down his spine to his vestigial tail even though he'd heard the message before.

"You're the only one that had to bail out," the female lemur said. "Right now, where you are is too heavily defended from orbital or aerial insertion for us to come get you right away."

"Of course it is," Yrler snorted.

"Fighting is pretty heavy only a few hundred miles away from you," the lemur said.

"Past the planetary curvature," Yrler said. He paused her voice and looked at 515. "You're wobbling too much, you're going to drop the payload."

--hard to do-- 515 said.

"Want me to do it?" Yrler asked.

--can do it-- the green mantid said, somehow sounding slightly huffy. --bugs birds not fly straight line anyway--

"All right, all right," Yrler said. He triggered the female lemur's voice again.

"We have two LZ's close by, but close is relative. One is ten miles away, the other is only three but on the way to the further one," the female lemur said.

Yrler paid close attention to the next part. It was the third time he'd listened to the recording.

"NavInt says the first one should be fine, but my analysts and I believe the edges are too well defined and too straight to be natural," the female lemur said. "I would advise, at the most, do a distance scouting of the nearest LZ with a drone."

She paused a second.

"The nearest LZ ticks my antenna, I don't trust it, and I don't think you should either. I can't prove it right now, but I think NavInt is wrong," she said. "They have analysts and VI's to back them up, I have a hundred years experience doing stuff like this and a gut feeling that says the nearer LZ is off."

She paused again.

"You're the man on the ground. It's your call," the female lemur said. "I've patched you the coordinates and a topology map. Good luck, Yrler. Task Force Vecna SAR out."

Yrler thought about it.

515 agreed with the female lemur. Nature didn't do straight lines.

NavInt, for the most part, had a much better record than their reputation suggested.

Who did he trust more? The female lemur's gut instinct or NavInt's predictive analysts?

--plan-- 515 asked.

"Ten miles is a good distance. It'll take us most of a day to hike that far through the jungle. A lot can happen in a day," Yrler said.

--5 AD on ground in one day planet could go boom--

"True," Yrler said. "Second question: after we lay the repeaters, do we stim up and run for it or get some rest?"

--stimgum and run--

"Yeah," Yrler looked up at the sky. "I thought I wouldn't be hiking through Atrekna jungle again after I joined the striker corps."

--thought flatulence feces filled pants--

"Yeah," Yrler chuckled. "All right, when you place that last repeater we'll get moving."

Yrler watched 515 move the hacked together drone roughly the size of Yrler's hand over to the last of the big insects and set it down.

"Got it?"

--yup yup yup--

"Let's get moving," Yrler said. "Three miles, we might be able to do that in an hour or so."

-----

Yrler sat down on the rock outcropping, panting slightly, his fur matted with sweat. His ears were tingling from the fast marching and the stimgum, but he'd made it the three miles in just over an hour.

515 climbed off of him and onto the rocks, lifting up a set of macrobinoculars and looking at the clearing.

--look wrong-- the mantid engineer said. --vegetation stop lines smooth sharp look artificial--

Yrler sighed. "Let me look."

He rolled over and got out his own macrobinoculars, twiddling with the settings for a moment.

The clearing looked like it was just a field of grass, but 515 and the female lemur were right, it looked like the edges had been precisely cut by machinery.

"Yeah, I don't trust it either," Yrler said. He panned over it again. "I think that..."

515 tapped him and he saw the icon flash that his suit just went into stealth mode, the adaptive camouflage on the plating and the suit going to work.

--shhh--

Yrler didn't move, pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth and breathing slowly through his nose. He kept his mind carefully focused on the tiny bits of fungus on the gray pebbled rock formation he was laying on.

--purple people eaters--

Yrler saw his psychic shielding tick up to 11%, slowly, a tenth of a point at a time.

He could feel it. The razor edges sweep of Atrekna ruling caste passing over him.

He didn't close his eyes, didn't want to risk images coming up in his mind that they might detect.

Instincts honed over years of survival kicked in and Yrler was as still and silent as he could get, his mind filled only with the rock he was laying on.

The psychic shielding started to tick down, a tenth of a percent at a time.

Finally it was back to 4%. He made his decision slowly, pretending his thoughts were thick nutrigel, bland and colorless. He let his decision take long seconds to reach his muscles and slowly raised his head.

There were a dozen Atrekna moving into the clearing, all of them in ornate robes that glittered with phasic energy. They all wore jewelry, two held ornate staffs.

As he watched reality unfolded like origami, sharp edges and triangles and other strange shapes.

An entryway of gold crystal glimmered as the Atrekna moved through it.

The reality folded up and they were gone.

--oh boy--