Chapter 291 (2/2)

The first Lanaktallan forces to reach Smokey Cone itself slammed down onto fields of waist high grain that moved gently with the breeze beneath the huge red sun. They charged out with breathing masks and began trying to set up.

The lead Lanaktallan's helmet blew apart when a high-velocity round hit it just above his six eyes with a loud KRACK!

His brains followed.

Two more Lanaktallan were hit and dropped.

A Lanaktallan Eighteenth Most High pointed at a cloud rushing at them and called out a warning. Point defense on the ships started firing and the cloud spread out, thinned, but kept coming.

The snipers started focusing on the point defense systems and the Lanaktallan trying to set up battlescreen projectors.

The cloud turned out to be tiny drones, the size of a child's palm, that got close and went off. They fired a density collapsed battlesteel dart into the head of the troops, blowing the plassteel helmet apart and turning the head into little more than slurry, before reloading and darting for the next target. They were completely silent, running sonic baffling and suppression systems.

Even the darts were silent.

When there were no more targets, they attached to battlescreen projectors, weapon mounts, point defense systems, drive struts, and exploded with enough force that it not only destroyed what it was attached to but usually penetrated to the inner spaces.

More Lanaktallan charged out, tanks began to roll out, the sides dropped on others to reveal graviton propelled striker craft.

The missiles hit and went off inside the dropships. The tanks didn't have their systems online and the missiles aimed at them came in low, through the grain, propelled by grav-drivers, before suddenly arcing up and firing straight down in a top-down attack method.

The War Queen watched it all, surrounded by monitors. Beside her stood Space Force officers of all races. Her command center was hushed but busy as she oversaw the defense of Smokey Cone. She knew her presence was largely ceremonial, but it helped calm the populace to see a Queen overseeing their defense.

The Lanaktallans landed on the Great Moomoo Plains on Smokey Cone and ran face first into ancient defense systems that had been dusted off and quickly upgraded. A relic from the past, from the Smokey Cone Range Wars and Russelin' Runs, the heavy guns quickly chopped the dropships from the air. The 'local defense forces' made quick work of the few dropships that landed, most of them veterans of various wars since it was still tradition to hire Space Force Army and Marine veterans to help guard the vast moomoo herds.

The War Queen could see that, barring anything major changing, the Lanaktallan would lose the fight in less than four standard days. Already Lanaktallan troops were surrendering, several task forces had refused to cooperate with their fellows and had cut their engines at the resonance zone, and some dropships hit the ground and didn't open, the crews huddling inside.

She ordered that the dropships staying shut would be danced upon by power armor troops to demoralize them.

The Lanaktallan couldn't understand what went wrong.

The Terrans could have told them.

The Treana'ad had won over a fifth of all combat engagements.

They were a silly and goofy people, but they were also a clever people.

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In the Mantid Prime System over 90% of the Lanaktallan forces were killed or forced to surrender before they got anywhere near the three inhabited worlds. Again, they had based all of their strategy and tactics on their memories of the Precursor Mantid.

The Precursor Mantid had never been beaten until their own machines had turned on them.

These Mantid had not only been beaten, but had their society completely destroyed and the upper castes wiped out.

Making them an entirely new people.

They were no longer a unified hive mind throwing their lives away at the wills of the Speakers, the Warriors, and the Queens, they were a hive of individuals all working toward a common goal (for the most part).

The combat craft moved with precision and as a unified whole not because they were one mind without any individualism but because they had trained and had experience at working with one another as well as technological assistance.

The Lanaktallan would have been unsure about what to think about the crews of the light attack craft.

Pursues the Dark Spaces was a black carapaced Mantid. In the days prior to the Daxin Liberation he would have been one of a hundred drones to die to protect and assist a warrior. He would have been trapped, screaming, inside his own mind, as the will of the Warrior Caste would have sacrificed him without a second thought. He would have been nameless but worse he would have been without self determination.

But that was before Daxin the Liberator had killed the Omni-Queen and freed his people.

Now he was an aerospace pilot in a fighting craft designed on Hateful Mars and manufactured in the Hate Anvils of Mars before being shipped to Mantid Prime. There were four engineer stations behind him, each with a highly trained green mantid who's sole job it was to help the computer systems keep the craft at optimum fighting condition.

The nose of his craft, which was a heat shroud wrapped around a rapid fire snub-nose twin barrel C+ cannon, was painted with the red haired female warrior with a sword, the stubby wings, which worked in atomsphere to give him excellent manueverability, had missile pods slung below it with heavy missiles with warheads powerful enough to crack a Lanaktallan heavy frigate's shields in one shot. His battlescreens were more powerful that a Lanaktallan light cruiser's shields.

He was death incarnate.

The Lanaktallan did not know of him, they had not planned for him, they could not understand him.

Or his ten thousand fellow warriors.

From Commander Gwvarwk, who was the Divisional Body Building Champion, to Commander Harold Louise Charnuk who cheated at cards and changed sex more often than Pursues changed hats, to Commander Kilk'iknik who painted the nose of his ship to resemble his favorite ice cream, they were all brothers and sisters in warsteel.

And Pursues knew they would be as dedicated to defending his home as he was.

The Lanaktallan had no idea that the foe they were preparing to fight had been defeated, been beaten, been destroyed eight thousand years ago by the wrath and hate infused fists of an enraged primate.

The Lanaktallan had brought five times as many troopships as they had dedicated to any other attack.

None of them made it to a planet's surface.

They had prepared for their last war against the Mantid.

So they had no idea how they got wiped out.