Chapter 291 (1/2)

The Lanaktallan forces that attacked the other worlds expected their attacks to succeed merely because they launched them. They barely took in any account of their targets fighting back or having any skill at fighting back.

Most of them, from Corporate to Executor, had experience putting down attempted neo-sapient rebellions, some of them even on Leebaw. They had experience in crowd control, suppression, and occupation against an unarmed enemy.

Their neural templates were full of victory after victory after victory. How to turn situations experienced by War Stallions (gone tens of millions of years) from possible defeat to total victory through the sheer weight of the Great Herd.

Long ago it had been determined that loading up memories of how to deal with defeat only put the thought of defeat into the minds of the Lanaktallan who had taken the place of the War Stallions. When new ones were added, they added merely victories, not examples of strategy and tactics, not examples of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, only example after example of victory, each victory getting easier as templating heavy fighting might give the Lanaktallan troops the idea that the enemy could fight back.

Cargo Cultist work at its finest.

With Victory Disease stirred in.

At Smokey Cone they came loaded up with Precursor War neural templates normally used for additional training for War Stallions, as an addition to field training, weapons training, a harsh training cycle that only produced the best of the best.

It was loaded into Lanaktallan who had done nothing but fight against those weaker than them to the point that most of the attempted insurrections didn't even have weapons.

Worse, their brains weren't the same as War Stallions, so the overlays didn't take right.

They dropped into Smokey Cone with the idea that it would be fighting Mantid wave tactics that sought to get in close. Mantid ships preferred to get in close where they could merge their hivemind with tactical computers to shred their opponents.

After all, the Treana'ad looked kind of like Mantids (wrong coloring, different shaped head, different style footpads, their abdomens were armored) which meant they should fight like Mantids.

Their strategy also completely neglected to take into account the fact that the Treana'ad were part of a larger organization.

The largest organization the Lanaktallan had fought was a twelve system/three race rough cooperative nearly eighty-million years ago.

The Treana'ad were part of the Terran Confederacy.

And all that implies.

So the Lanaktallan dropped in at the resonance zone of Smokey Cone and drove for the planets, confident in their victory, their minds full of victories of the past. Around several guns were crude pictures of Terran bovines surrounded by dancing hatchlings drawn with 10 meter wide lines into the sand so that it could be seen from orbit.

It was a Treana'ad thing, it made sense to them.

On the sixth planet the siege battery looked goofy. The guns were painted bizarre colors and sat under a red giant sun. The sand was drawn in patterns, most of them faces or words, around the huge cannons. The crews all wore the bizarre outfits (to anyone else) of the Planetary Defense Force.

The temporal ranging scope spotted the ships before even the gravitics and the PDF began loading their guns at the same time the Corporate Wave dropped out of jumpspace. The Hive Queens met over hyperlink to discuss with the Senior Matrons about what this meant for the Treana'ad peoples.

The Lanaktallan had barely reconfigured their computers from jumpspace to realspace when the first C+ cannon rounds hit, firing at temporal sight locked in targets. They started moving in only to meet missiles painted in weird patterns, with white, brown, pink being the most common.

The Corporate Fleet had taken 10% casualties when the Military Fleet arrived.

The Hive Queens decided and The Bag was closed.

It had been devised during the Lagnalkak Invasion that led to the terrible war that spawned the Confederacy, and had been updated at the beginning of the Mar-gite Invasion, as a way for each stellar system to protect itself from unceasing wave attacks.

Each stellar system, like Smokey Cone, had its defenses laid out as if The Bag was closed, with no reinforcement coming for either side.

Which meant that the lovely human concept of 'Overwhelming Firepower' was gleefully adopted.

Not that it mattered to the Lanaktallan, who had lost over 50% of their Corporate Fleet and 25% of their Military Fleet by the time they realized just how badly they were screwed.

The Treana'ad had always used their two greatest advantages to good effect.

Speed and size.

A Treana'ad warrior was capable of running up to 50 mph for an hour with a full combat load, which often consisted of abdomen mounted mortars, anti-armor rockets, or air to air missiles or even just a tried and true minigun and ammo pack.

The alliance with the Terrans, through the Mantid War and everything else, meant that their military tech matched the Terrans.

Treana'ad aerospace fighters made use of the fact that Treana'ad were excellent fliers. All hatchlings could fly for the first few years of their lives. Usually just from the ground to their mother's abdomen, but they could still actually fly. The aerospace fighters were heavily armored, thickly armored, with heavy battle-screens that matched Lanaktallan light frigates. The pilots either hung back and emptied dense missile packs then moved under stealth to a new position while the nano-forges reloaded their packs or came in hard and fast on white-knuckle strafing runs depending on their ship's current loadout.

The ship captains and officers were Confederate Space Force in addition to Treana'ad System Defense, meaning that they had a wide breadth of experienced officers and crews. The ships quickly learned that Lanaktallan weaponry was poor at long range, their missiles were half-blind and easily picked off by the thousands by the point defense systems, and half the time jammers made them just self-destruct.

The DS EWarfare officers found themselves grinding their digital teeth. The Lanaktallan ships had such 'thin' systems that it felt like trying to squeeze themselves through a copper phone line. Half the time they could only take over the ship's limited VI and puppet it while the majority of their thought processes were handled by their attack torpedo. Still, between them and the eVI's (that had to shoulder their way through the systems like a bull in a china shop) they accounted for nearly 15% of both fleets. The command and control ships were the 'fattest' targets, but the DS troops still felt claustrophobic in the systems, often doing the equivalent of 'hyperventilating' when inside the system.

The Lanaktallan fleets pushed hard to make it to the planets only to run face first into far more than they expected. Even their worst simulations didn't take into account what they found around the planets.

They had expected minefields, after all, that was what 'neo-sapients' used to defend their planets.

Except it wasn't minefields, it was missile launchers, each with a dedicated set of nano-forges, FTL communication links, and heavy missiles too big for anything but a dedicated missile wagon. The idea of pod layers stuffed to the brim with pods had been replaced by pod-layers with dedicated nano-forges and mass tanks that could put out a thousand times the number.

The Corporate Fleet ran face first into a wall of missiles so thick they could have gotten out and walked to Smokey Cone itself.

Not one of the Corporate Fleet got within ten light seconds of a planet.

Well their debris did.

On the surface the evacuation to the shelters was calm and orderly, fashionably dressed Civil Defense Matrons moving through the lines with power-smokers, patient moomoo tenders guiding their charges into armored barns that would lower into the depths of the earth to protect the precious moomoos, little hatchlings screeching with joy with their little voices at the images they could see on the nearby Tri-Vees, egg and grub tenders chivvying their charges into their protective pods and sending them whooshing through the system to reach the great under-ground hatching grounds, and the military forces armoring and arming up.

The Hive Queens voted in the War Queen and the others retreated to their bunkers. The Senior High Matrons voted in the six War Matrons and retreated to assume their duties in leading the Treana'ad people during this stressful time.

Discipline and cleverness would see the Treana'ad people through this trial.