First Contact

Chapter 525: Resurgence

"A normal being will tell you, you cannot fight a planet, you cannot fight the tide, you cannot fight the changing seasons. A Mad Lemur of Terra will tell you to: hold my beer." - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

Yrklik stared at what looked like the edge of a soap bubble to his senses. An iridescent barrier that was thin but distorted what was beyond it. He could see a city in the distance, see grass and trees, see the road he was standing on surrounded by his warrior caste and servitor warriors that made up his attack group.

According to his psychic senses there was nothing beyond the soap bubble, but he watched as a bird above circled, half of its path entered the soap bubble before it exited a handful of seconds later.

The Overqueen had ordered him to enter the city, assault it with his force of two hundred warriors and five thousand servitor warriors. He had no vehicles, vehicles seemed to attract record numbers of anti-vehicle munitions as well as air strikes by strikers performing close combat runs so low that the graviton engines tore up the ground. He had no artillery, that had vanished in the white light of an atomic strike. He had no air support, none of the warrior caste devoted to air power survived longer than a half hour before being ripped from the sky.

Three weeks.

Three weeks he had been fighting for possession of the planet. Three and a half weeks since he had been thawed from his eternal slumber.

Three weeks and he still felt chilled. Still felt a lingering stiffness and chill in his ichor.

Three weeks of fighting with exactly jack and shit to show for it.

Yrklik considered himself lucky. Most of the Speakers that he had landed with were dead. He had been engaged in pitched battles twice and come out on top.

The primitives and mind-blank were extremely tough fighters that did not react with fear and panic to the psychic assaults of the Mantid warrior caste, or even the Speakers.

While normally, by himself, he should have been able to overwhelm the planet, the entire planet seemed to be full of psychic static. He could barely control a few hundred yards around himself, could barely keep the servitor caste at ease, could barely communication with his own people.

Of course, just his luck, he could still communicated with the Queens and the Overqueen.

**What is taking you so long?** the Queen in orbit asked.

**There is a type of psychic barrier here,** Yrklik answered. **As we approached artillery dropped and deployed submunitions and now there is a psychic barrier between the city and my troops.**

**Can you physically enter it?** the Queen snapped.

**Well, yes, but...** Yrklik started to explain.

**THEN ENTER IT AND ASSAULT THE CITY, YOU MORON!** the Queen yelled, making his shudder and his head wince with pain. Anxiety spiked as his limbic system pushed him to follow the queen's commands and his intellect told him to stay away from that bubble.

There was just something about it that gave Yrklik the heebie-jeebies.

**As you command** he answered automatically. He reached out to his men. **Move out**

The Queen stayed in contact with him as his men gathered around him, servitors on the outside, warriors on the inside clustered around the massive figure of the Speaker.

The Queen watched through a thousand eyes as the Mantid warriors started moving in perfect unison, all in step, and rushed through the bubble.

She lost contact instantly, as soon as the cross the thin permeable membrane. They didn't die.

They just vanished.

Screeching in fury the Queen ordered Yrklik to answer her, screaming over the psychic network to the point the Overqueen had to reach out and quiet her.

Groundside, Yrklik rushed through the membrane, holding his breath as if it would help, and charged nearly a hundred meters before he realized something.

The touch of the Overqueen and the Queen was gone. He couldn't feel her in there.

His anxiety suddenly released and he came to a stop.

The warriors stopped with him.

The servitor caste warriors stopped and looked around.

**this sucks** Yrklik heard.

**tired of this bullshit** he heard another voice

**this warrior has a pattern on his abdomen that looks like two Urgulaurth pooping on a rock**

there was some giggling.

**Do you hear that, Speaker?** Warrior R'Nerkak asked.

**shhh***

**oh crap**

**great now what do they want**

**fuck this I wanna go home**

^^d=((x_2-x_1)+(y_2-y_1)) ^^

**anyone got anything to eat**

**check out that rock**

**hey does anyone see my rifle**

^^ cos(TD/24) = -(tan)(tanL) ^^

^^T (MET 3.5 W) / 200 ^^

Yrklik stood silently for a long moment. The voices were small, tiny, compared to the roar of his fellow speakers and the all consuming voice of the Queens. There was a multitude of them, chattering at one another. He reached out to the warriors, stopping them from acting, telling them to hold still, maintain their calm, and center themselves.

**If you can hear and understand me, raise your right bladearm** Yrklik said

For a second nothing happened. A few started to raise their bladearms but were poked or kicked by their fellows and dropped them. The babbling fell to a whisper and then silence. A bird called in the distance and he could faintly hear the krump of mortar rounds hitting the ground.

He repeated his request, ending it with "if you kindly would."

He stood up to his full height in shock as all the black and green carapaced servitors suddenly raised their right bladearms.

----------------

I am less than fifty kilometers from the base of the master hive. It has been within range of my guns since I landed as a Hellbore is a line of sight weapon. The vacuum provides no attenuation to the power of my main guns, my VLS and indirect fire weapons have nothing to stop them.

But to attack to early is to lose the fight.

That does not mean I was idle. As Nekonya, my Kentai Commander and I move forward I am still extremely busy and the two of us are already engaged in the fighting.

My databanks possess a huge wealth of data. From the mad infantry charge of the Hamburgler against the forces of Grimace of the Maddened Purple to the tactics of the Hittites and Ramses at the Battle of Kadesh as well as the tank tactics of the First Global Conflict and the tank battles of the War of the Box.

Of course there are massive data files pertaining to the Human-Mantid Wars. From tactics to equipment, I have it all in my databanks.

We slow at one point to give the creation engine time to dry-print pieces of hardware we need.

I remind Nekonya that Mantid engineers make some of the best security software in the Confederacy, to which she reminds me that these are Lanaktallan War Mantids.

She is proven right when we discover the entire computer system of the vast hive ship is a trusted network that only requires a single unencoded login to gain access to.

Children's toys have more security.

Twenty minutes later I have penetrated their computer network and Nekonya and I move through their databanks stealthily. While our physical bodies are parked next to a vast array of near-C velocity cannons, all facing toward the outer system, our minds rove the computing systems of the vast ship.

What we find is chilling.

The ship is ancient at its core. Its superstructre laid down over a hundred million years ago. It was refurbished and finished within the last five years and loaded two years ago with millions of eggs as well as Mantid in cryosleep.

The ones in cryosleep are all veterans of the Mantid-Lanaktallan- War.

The ship houses massive egg chambers, twelve queens, and a single Overqueen. There are millions of mantid onboard the ship. There are also nine hitherto unknown species on board used as a food supply, dwelling in vast areas inside the ship that are the size of megaplexes.

While Nekonya and I are loathe to sacrifice those poor beings who make up little more than a larder, we both agree that the most vitally important are the residents of the planet below. Citizens of the Confederacy who are under attack.

An additional problem rears its head as we look over the ship itself.

If the ship were reduced to a cylinder, it would be 5,900 miles wide and 300 miles thick. The ship's volume is 8,197,755,873 cubic miles. Two point three times the volume of the largest orbital body, which is two point five million miles closer than the ship. The ship is large enough to be affecting the time, the mass exerting a gravitational pull upon the planet.

I cannot allow it to get closer or, in a worse case scenario, impact that planet. It would be a continent slamming into the planet. A continent made of advanced hyperalloys.

We confer as my support drones move silently up and down the massive nCv Battery, using welding lasers to jam and damage the massive aiming gears as well as disabling the magnetic acceleration coils wrapping the barrel. Another set of drones is slowly disabling an array of missile launchers nearly a hundred miles wide and three miles deep.

The scale of this battle is vast, but I have experienced such vastness during my assault upon the planetary repair and refit facility.

The problem is threefold: The sheer size is going to make it difficult to reach the chambers of the Queens, which we determined is a hundred miles under the hive cone in nearly the exact center. Once the queens are eliminated there is no guarantee that the remaining Mantid are going to side with the Confederacy. Indeed, they may continue to prosecute the planetary assault or even attempt a suicidal ramming attack. Finally, the existence of a dozen High Speakers being tracked onboard the ship by the Mantid computer net means that even with the loss the queens the High Speakers could hold the hive mind together.

My options are limited.

I lament, at one point, that we have no infantry support. Infantry would be optimum to invade the hive ship and strike for the queen while we provide a diversion that could not be ignored by attacking everyone on the surface we can reach.

The guns are designed to strike out at foes, not protect the surface.

That makes Nekonya go silent for a long while. She accessed the databanks and finds the data she is looking for.

It makes me quail back in revulsion.

After the Glassing Terra, after the fall of the Imperium, there was the Age of Warlords. A brief time in history, but one marked by brutality as 'Doomsday Weapons' that had been employed in the Mantid War, the Clone War, Legion's War, the Imperium Conflict, and the Martial Order Crusade had returned to human held worlds and decided that their might put them in the right.

What she is examining is from that time.

Part of me wonders why I even possess that type of data.

I am aghast at the fact that a normal Terran Descent Human Commander would not have been able to unlock and decrypt the data, but by virtue of being a Kentai Commander, her authorization is more than sufficient to unlock such a horror.

There are Twelve High Speakers. They are marked with targeting numbers. The Sniffbois inside the system are ordered to track those speakers. There are twelve queens and an Overqueen, all labeled with targeting numbers.

Twenty-five targets. Over half of which were in the same location.

Our intrusion into their computer systems have given us extensive maps of the interior of the hiveship. There is no route large enough for me to enter the ship. I would be forced to use my main gun to carve a corridor through the ship, as I had been forced to do on the Precursor Autonomous War Machine repair and refit planet. Our estimations show it would take two and a half hours to carve such a channel even if I went to rapid fire on my main gun, which would give the Mantid a chance to counter-attack or even destroy the planet, much less move the Queens.

Nekonya's suggestion, while repulsive to me, would take longer, but I compute it has a solid 80% chance of success.

We both consider the implications of what we are about to do. The last time these infantry troops had been used, several of them had 'gone rogue' if one did not look at their programming and orders. They were biologicals, yes, but vat-grown for specific tasks and pushed the limit of then TDH genetics.

But we cannot deliberate too long, every minute that passes the battle on the surface of the planet rages.

While the plan would work, we consider the aftermath and decide that using the MD-GEIST protocols would ultimately prove too dangerous. Regretfully, we decide we must come up with another answer that a super-tanks armed with Hellbores and commanded by a Kentai Commander can accomplish.

I rotate and check my stealth systems, preparing to move out.

Right before I engage my treads a ship streaks into existence as it exits warp speed.

I immediately halt all preparation for movement and orient a single directional antenna, compressing the data we have gained so far and sending it over the tightly focused unidirectional multi-phasic frequency hopping communication's beam.

My scanners report the ship's IFF, but its signature is nothing like the ship listed in my registry. However, the war has been going on for years now and the fact the ship may have been refit is a 63.6312% possibility.

I hail the Dakota.

--------------

"Shields up! Get me those scans!" Jeff Pikark called out to his crew. The bridge was full of smoke, the carpeting scorched, several consoles and work stations blackened and scorched. The crew was clad in armored vac-suits more in line with Confederate Space Force than Starfleet bridge uniforms. The battle against a hive ship only hours behind them, an actual combat in jumpspace so close behind them that debris from the shattered Mantid ship in the Heavy Cruiser class was still exiting warp/jumpspace around his ship. "Status against the boarders!"

"Shields up, reconfiguring and rehashing algorithm," Worf barked. "Bringing primary phasic shielding to seventy percent with a nanosecond trigger."

"Security reports the last of the holdouts have just surrendered. Jumpshock and Warpshock took out the last remaining Speaker," Uhuru said, her voice calm and level.

"We're on the money! That's another hive ship! I knew it was there, I knew it!" Chekov called out, slapping his console with a grin. His faceshield on his vac-suit was cracked, but he could still read his status boards. "It's a big one, sir. Almost as big as the first one we encountered. I'm detecting orbit to ground missile launches and dropship signatures."

"Get us an angle!" Pikark barked. He tabbed his thumb against one of the control panels. "Engineering, status on the Pike Shot?"

"Loaded and ready. She's only good for one, maybe two shots. The main compression chamber is showing micro-fractures already, one of the recoil clamps is cracked, and a primary buffer spring is showing fatigue," someone said. The man playing the position of Scotty had been killed when the remainder of a Mantid strike team had managed to reach engineering.

They hadn't taken it, but casualties had included the Chief Engineer.

"Do what you can," Pikark ordered. "It's a big one."

"Sir, transmission on the Dinochrome Brigade Channel. ID checks out as Unit XXIX-TCSF 3285-ATL, listed as lost in combat Stardate 8531.42. ID headers and security checks come back positive," Uhuru called out.

"Where is he?" Pikark asked.

"Putting it onscreen now," Uhuru said.

The big viewscreen, cracked and warped, flickered on, the engineers having already done their best to repair it even though there were many more systems that needed fixed.

A wireframe of the massive Hiveship appeared, rotated, then focused down on a point a little over a hundred miles from the massive hive structure.

"Bet that's a story of how he got there," Pikark said, grinning and shaking his head.

"Call sign Attila is currently running with a Kentai Commander," Uhuru said. "He is in need of infantry and orbital support."

"Tell him he'll have it," Pikark said. He tabbed a button. "Get the Marines locked and ready. It looks like a boarding action in support of a BOLO on that hiveship."

"Roger, sir," Yar snapped. She turned to the gathered Marines, who were reloading their ammunition supplies. Gone were the phaser rifles, all of them were carrying Confederate Army magac rifles. "Suit up for boarding action, we're taking the fight to the Hiveship and its queen!"

There was a slight pressure, the feeling of the air being pushed by a massive tidal wave touching one's cheek before the water lifted out of the ocean to plot everything array.

Everyone aboard the Dakota tasted blue as the phasic inhibitor slammed to 85% and the additional systems locked down.

Pikark could feel the snarl of hatred from the massive Hiveship.

"You think we can't hurt you," Pikark said.

"Captain, readings show this is the one we hit at New Terra two months ago," Chekov called out.

"Getting an angle," Sulu called out.

"Pike Shot Cannon ready, sir," Worf said. He could taste the bitter tang of venom as his body reacted to psychic assault with leakage from his vestigial venom glands.

"She knows we're here," Pikark said. "Open fire, phaser banks, photon torpedoes, and trans-phasic torpedoes!"

As the massive Dakota maneuvered for a clear shot it went to rapid fire, the phaser beam taking nearly three seconds to cross the massive distance, even as it outraced the torpedoes. The engine arrays of the vast hiveship suddenly lit up and it began pulling away from the planet.

"Get us behind her, Mister Sulu," Pikark said. He reached out and rubbed his left arm, which still tingled from the last fight where the Hivequeen had attempted to spike everyone's blood pressure as a last desperate attempt to fight off the Dakota.

----------

Nemta was looking up at the night sky when he saw it.

The huge hiveship had ignited its engines. Over a hundred of them turning into one massive burning bar.

It started to move. Not in the stately orbit of the last three weeks.

It was moving away from the planet.

Again, he wished he had an aerospace fighter.

-------------

Yrklik could not feel anything from the Overqueen or any of the others. He was completely entranced by listening to the little servitors. The other warriors were clustered around the servitors that had served them for years in silence.

Now their little voices were raised in song.

Yrklik saw the engines of the Great Vessel come on, saw that it was pulling away from the planet.

Good riddance, bitch.