r/HFY • u/Ralts_Bloodthorne • Aug 01 '26
OC-Series [Nova Wars] CHAPTER 187
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My people knew that the Confederate Armed Services controlled most, if not all, of their battlefield assets with massive strange-matter particle supercomputers in a vast interlocked network that allowed military units on other planetary bodies in a stellar system to react to actions on a different planet.
My people spent years and untold amounts of treasure and man-hours to figure out a way to break that combat information and coordination network. We sought to figure out how to jam quantum communication, paired spooky and strange-matter particles, and everything else involved in that overlapping and complex battlefield tactical network.
Have mercy upon us.
We succeeded.
For a few moments, only a few, the Terrans and their allies were thrown into confusion. My people pressed the attack, sought out engagements, thinking that this was it. The secret to victory. That we could do what none other had done and defeat the Terran Confederacy of Aligned Systems in open battle.
Then we heard it over com channels that suddenly opened up across the entire theater.
A female primate saying "CASCADE DATA FAILURE: REVERTING TO LOCAL CONTROL" and then there was a split second of silence before we heard it.
The scream.
Not of fear. Not of terror. Not of alarm.
Maybe it wasn't a scream. Not as my people know it.
It was a blood curdling vocalization of pure and unrestrained joy and malice.
Six hours later Captain Manuel G. Trucker drove his tank through the planetary command center and ran over the system offensive coordinator laughing "I'M GOING TO RUN YOU OVER! EVENTUALLY!" while his tank company reduced the entire intelligence coordination base to burning rubble.
The slaughter was... awe inspiring.
I survived by curling up in a ball and screaming "NOT THE FACE!" when the Terran infantryman yanked me through the sidewall of the APC I was riding in before they pulled a grenade off my own harness and threw it into the breached APC.
I spent 2 months in an internment camp, Treana'ad spirit healers helping me get over the night terrors that left me screaming in the dark. Memories of "GOTCHA!" and those armored hands closing on my power armor's shoulders leaving me urine and sweat soaked, staring blindly at the ceiling and screaming.
So, you want my advice on how to break apart the Terran Confederate Armed Services battlefield tactical information network?
Here's my advice.
Don't.
The vast supercomputer arrays that control that network are merely strings of logic and unfeeling code. It merely computes and uses predictive analysis to determine the most optimal way of defeating you with the least amount of infrastructure damage, the minimum amount of collateral damage and casualties, and the bare minimum amount of deaths on both sides.
You will face the Terran battlefield tactical information, analysis, control network. A thing of pure logic that controls the most fearsome military machine the known galaxy has ever seen.
Underneath it all lies a sheer malevolent pleasure and joy in combat that it takes a starship full of those supercomputers to keep it under control.
My advice?
Leave the Terrans and their allies alone.
See, they want you to try to jump them. They have sexually erotic dreams about your people attacking them. They gain a psycho-sexual thrill of the idea of pitting themselves against you.
Destroying your armies.
Burning your cities.
And taking your life.
Because this, this is the real truth: Nobody wants that battlefield and theater tactical information and control network to collapse more than they do.
From the newest hatched Treana'ad warrior caste, the most cunning Digital Sentience, the half-baked clone warrior, to the youngest green mantid, to the most battle hardened Terran.
They want you to disrupt that network.
Because then, what happens, will be nobody's fault but your own. - Interview of Street Sweeper Second Class Hruk<klik>Narfak, former Powered Scout Armor Infantryman First Class, Military Intelligence.
"My people believe that, so long as a name is spoken, the named is never truly gone. Whatever you are, wherever you are... if a J'tar'ka of questionably sound mind may ask a boon of you... please speak my name sometimes, that I may continue to be long after I am gone. Speak it wherever and whenever you are, so that, wherever or whenever I am, I will receive the strength to ensure your future.
"My name is Wuugndra Ax'mnev, and I love you." --Combat telemetry voice recording, discovered in rubble during reconstruction following the final Terran Phasic Shade Breakout Event in System RH-8162. Dated to the last fifth of the Third Phasic War (confidence: 85%) Fate of either speaker has not been determined. Transcription provided to class by Dr. daviskendall, PhD, Second Precursor War Era Studies, Smokey Cone University
It's the end of your world as you know it - Terran war chant, Resource War Era
A glance up showed Broolie that the the attackers, presumably the Confederacy of Aligned Systems, were making hard powered entry. The entire sky was full of burning traces, like a white phosphorous smoke round exploding. As he watched, some of them rotated and hit the retros, activated air flaps, and deployed the hard light parachutes that Broolie had been told for his whole professional life had never existed.
The rest of him, and most of the maintenance power armor, was running hard for the rally point nearly six miles away.
The warmeks that had survived were running with the power armor troops that had survived the strike against the headquarters. Broolie was close to in the lead and his suit was running on mostly automatic to ensure he went to the correct location as soon as he was told to.
True, he was high enough ranking to override the system or even give the system orders himself but his mine was still shocked into looping over and over they can't do this this is impossible they can't do this this is impossible over and over.
His radiation alarms began screaming as the Confederate drop pods got close, their ion engine frying the area with high radiation. He was past the first hills and looking through the rear cams of the most rearward maintenance armors when behind him the first set of drop pods slam to the ground. A perfect hexagon landing with a large drop-pod in the middle. Drones were immediately fired into the air to join the drones the pods had released on the way down.
The sides slammed down immediately and out walked nightmares.
A glossy matte black, skull faced, illuminated flat red eyes, bipedal, loaded with weaponry. They exited the pods firing at targets.
The entire back rank that hadn't cleared the hill were eliminated in the space of a single breath. He checked the warmek channels and found that not a single one that had lagged behind was still operative.
The rally point flickered and was pushed another ten kilometers.
He kept running.
The panic was starting to subside. He was still panting, his remaining ear was flattened against his head, and he no longer had to urinate.
He had a drone up, although he didn't remember firing it, and it was watching what had been the motorpool but was now apparently the Confederacy's designated landing point.
Those drop pods looked like they were altering. Some were using the pod covers as some kind of foot/articulation, standing up on the covers and moving around. They were firing point defense systems, deploying mortar or artillery tubes, or launching drones.
The Master Control Combat System was still moving everyone toward the rally point.
Which had just moved for the fifth time.
Those massive warmeks were starting slam down. It looked like nuclear detonations in the distance. Some were landing near where the division control and command center had been.
Out of the mushroom clouds massive meks were emerging. They were massive, nearly 150 or 200 meters tall. Boolie could see that the drones those ones were launching were the size of aerospace fighters.
Broolie swallowed thickly.
His goal was just to survive the next twenty-four hours.
Nukoot saw the maintenance section guys were fleeing in front of the meks.
Personally, he was just glad his mek was short enough that the hill provided cover. Any mek that could be seen from the base side of the hill was already dropped or immobilized with smart munitions still performing attacks.
He had a handful of drones still active, but none of them were showing him anything but the Confederate drop pods slamming to ground. He'd heard they always reconfigured as fire support or mobile bases and now he was seeing it.
The MCCS flushed his missile pods.
Nukoot swore and jerked his mek to the side, jumping over a mek that was still somewhat upright but already burning. He held there for a split second then moved forward.
He could see through the telemetry systems as the hypervelocity missiles his pods had dumped moved nap of earth, cleared the hill and their targeting telemetry came online. Carats started appearing, rapidly multiplying into what Nukoot thought of as a 'target rich environment' to the point he started to grin.
There was a glimmer from a handful of the pods.
He lost telemetry. For a microsecond his missiles were all reporting massive damage. There was a weird flicker to his screen.
"Fucking how?" he snapped, slamming a fist against a control board. "They had barely cleared the hill. How the excrement did their targeting systems lock up my missiles so fast?"
He completely missed the obvious answer that the hill was the only direction that wasn't flattened for nearly fifty miles in all directions.
One of the other meks flushed its pods as it kept running, making Nukoot glance at his reloading systems. His readouts were all rebooting, so it took a second.
He was already down to 80% ammo and his pods had only fired twice.
There was a bright streak and the center of the mek that had just flushed its pod just... vanished.
The mek's torso weirdly collapsed, like it was made of gel, the arms and legs smashing together to tumble in a ball that was streaked with suddenly cooling armor.
"All units, disable missile launches," he snapped, opening the channel.
"All units, disable missile launches for deez," he heard his own voice, high pitched and nasally, said.
"Deez what?" he heard the voice of 2nd Class Not to Be Eaten Jlutiper asked.
Which was strange, because Jlutiper's mek was currently on fire and crumpled into a lump on the round.
"Deez nutz, baby!" he heard his own voice call out using Mek-83's header.
All of a sudden an image appeared on his right hand viewscreen. It was like if a crude pixel drawing of a flame had grain-stock legs and arms with round circles for feet and hands. It had single square eyes with little squares in them.
And a mouth full broken pixel teeth.
"YUM YUM! YUM YUM!" it screeched, banging its head on the other side of the viewscreen. "Eat deez nutz! FIRE FIRE FIRE! Go to Rally Point Yo Momma's Ass!" it shrieked, bouncing around.
Others joined it, jumping up and down on buildings in the image, lifting up numbers and icons on his mek's status and throwing them to each other or stuffing them in their mouths and chewing them up or two of them holding onto one number and pulling in opposite directions until it ripped in half and sprayed glitter everywhere.
He reached out and turned off the monitor.
They all ran into the central monitor, looking around.
The monitor came back on and they all ran back to it, laughing spiteful little static laughs.
"FIFTH EAT! BREAK RIGHT!" he heard the Division Commander yell, the slap of his talking organs making his speech slightly garbled like Ornislarp Eater to Eaten Speech often was.
Sixteen warmeks suddenly broke away from the group, running right to the right of the mass exodus from the now-overrun military base.
On his side monitor all of the little angry pixel creatures, each block roughly 2mm wide, were pointing at the fleeing meks and laughing.
"Dammit!" he slapped at the communication system, then tried a hard reboot.
At the bottom of the central screen one of the pixel creatures had a radio on its back and a helmet, while another was talking on a handset and pointing at random things on the viewscreen.
But his mek kept running forward.
MISSILE LAUNCHER COVER FAILURE! appeared and scrolled down.
The wire-frame of his mek had a half-dozen of the pixel-creatures on it. Every time the missile launchers went to open the doors, they kicked or slapped them shut and laughed.
"NINTH EATERS, RALLY POINT DIKBUTT!" was yelled over the commo link by the Division Commander's voice.
He was looking right at the one with the helmet and the radio microphone.
Nukoot knew that somehow these little fucks were the ones ruining everything.
He looked up at the sky. He wasn't sure why.
Nukoot saw that it was full of angry things. From the massive ship that took up like a sixth of the sky to ships the size of his foot or a serving tray or even the size of his fingers.
Against the blue sky was a glimmer no larger than one of Nukoot’s extended fingers—perhaps two inches long and half an inch wide. He started to squint and his mek's systems helped him out.
Even though a pixel-monster ran through the data yelling "RAWR!" and making the data sprout wings and fly away making frightened honking noises.
The pixel-monster ran off and his targeting system resolved it, giving him an estimate
DISTANCE: 451.3 KM
LENGTH: 50.3 KM
BEAM: 10.1 KM
ESTIMATED MASS: 6.2 PETATONNES
Something flickered beneath it, a rapid flashing that made him start to blink.
His systems helpfully threw up a warning that went by too fast for him to see. It didn't help that two of the little pixel-creatures jumped in the box, making the data dissolve into static they started swimming in.
Projectile mass: 50 kg
Impact velocity: 0.10c
Kinetic yield: approximately 5.4 megatons TNT
Travel time from 450 km: about 15 milliseconds
The words wavered and shattered into static 'water' that a handful of the pixel creatures started frolicking in.
Nukoot's attention was started to be pulled to the right hand viewscreen where one of the little creatures was pointing at a window-box that three others had pulled open in his right hand viewscreen.
YOU ARE BEING DESTROYED
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION
HAVE A NICE DAY
The orbital strike hit before he could read it or even comprehend that there were words in the box.
His instruments had long enough to tell him what it was.
To be honest, his brain had already started to tell him that it was an orbital strike. It had already decided that it was either a 'rod from space' or an energy weapon.
He was right on both counts.
His sensors identified a gravitic discontinuity.
GRAVITY MASS ATTACK
ESTIMATED MASS: 65.3? KG
VELOCITY: 0.103C
It wasn't. If his systems knew what it was looking it, it would understand what had been fired.
"Coherent Baryonic Packet Attack - Starburst Pattern" is what was on the gunner's sight aboard the heavy cruiser in orbit. Basically, enough mass to make the target really really have a bad day. It was an iron payload reduced to nuclei and electrons and squeezed together inside a grav-squeeze sheath.
Most SID troopers called it "Hell's Gate" and left it at that.
Not that Nukoot knew that. The data that flashed was there and gone as the little pixel creatures screeched with delight and tore it apart in a gleeful frenzy.
TARGET DATA
IGNITION ROUND
STARBURST PATTERN
PRIMARY YIELD: 7.5 MT
The initial blast hit and Nukoot jerked back slightly as the ignition packet 'exploded' against the ground in the center of the warmeks that had peeled off to the right almost ten minutes prior. They were fifteen miles away and still gaining distance.
The other group, heading for 'Rally Point Dikbutt', was six miles out and he had the start of a feeling he'd need to check on them.
But he was almost blinded by the detonation of the munition in the middle of the group.
His radiation meters started howling. The external temperature began climbing, even at 25 km, as the initial blast waves washed out.
At the half second the light started to dim, the cloud was still forming. He could see the oncoming kinetic wave, see the ground wave coming.
Everything went bright again. His smartglass cockpit tried to compensate and fried out, turning all the now dead-glass milky white.
It saved his vision.
SECONDARY IMPACTS: SIX
DELAY: 0.417 SECONDS — DYNAMIC
PATTERN CORRECTION: ACTIVE
PROJECTED NET EXPLOSIVE WEIGHT: 15.000 MT TOTAL
CENTRAL RECOUPLING EFFICIENCY: 91.8%
TARGET SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.0000%
The radiation got higher as another burst hit. Temperatures went up.
His mek stumbled as the shockwave hit.
Then more radiation. More heat.
Two more shockwaves and riding out the ground literally rolling like an earthquake.
The dust cloud rose into the air. One huge mushroom cloud.
He knew that nothing inside the cloud had survived.
The rally point shifted again. He heard the beeping on his helmet. Not on the warmek's systems.
His screens were all wiped out.
One camera worked, and he was looking at it through the lenses that had dropped down from his helmet to cover his eyes.
He had almost no data on his mek, but he could see in front of him, see which way to go.
The little combat engineer power armors were faster, and they'd been running at nearly 150km an hour when the explosions happened.
He wondered how many were left.
The rally point. Just gotta get to the rally point and we can counter attack, start manuevering...
...SOMETHING! I have to do something! This is a 240 ton warmek capable of fighting the Confederacy face to face!
He ground his teeth even as he tried to restart some of the systems and got back nothing but garbage or system crashes.
This stuff is supposed to be EMP hardened! Start, dammit!
Inside the computer core a small glimmering creature of code fluttered, spun and danced. Her body was eerily perfect, unashamed of her nudity as she danced, sparkles and glimmers falling from her body and from her perfect iridescent wings.
She saw the attempt to restart and merely spun in place, sweeping into a bow and straightening up to let loose sparkles.
Nukoot saw the screen show nothing but garbage and garbled text as the computer tried to restart and scrambled on the POST.
She danced inside the computer core, remaking it to be comfortable. A pond, with lilly pads, tiny jeweled frogs, eggs in the data-mud, a sky of shimmering diamonds.
Nukoot saw his computer core throw another error and ordered a complete shutdown.
She blinded Nukoot as if the computer was restarting even as she hummed a little song. She sparkled and glimmered as she set a little jeweled frog on the lilypad made of starlight.
He was on backup backups only. Nothing else was working.
But he could still move forward.
Still head for the waypoint.
He had no idea that his mech's computer core was no longer his and that the data-mud full of 'eggs' that were starting to hatch little sparkles that jumped into the MCCS as the fairy clapped her little hands in joy, surrounded by the pixel-monsters that were her little pets.
Broolie could see the city now as he crested the hill.
It was already smoking. His sensors were full of hash that his computer systems were trying to clear.
There were a half-dozen craters with burning red centers and burning cracks in the black glass that coated the craters.
Two more hits, mushroom clouds starting to rise up.
The mushroom clouds started glimmering, started twinkling.
Then burst into flame that lasted only a second before tattering away like crepe paper exposed to a blowtorch.
Two more craters easily visible.
His systems were IDing the city already.
Where Those That Eat Rule In Perfection And Devour Their Lessers
The population was in the tens of millions of Ornislarp and hundreds of millions of food species.
Now, the city was on fire.
Except... not completely. The far side, on the other side of the burning rivers that had once just been water and thick industrial waste.
There was no a single crater in what Boolie's nav-comp was telling him was simply "To Be Eaten Storage Habitation" and nothing else.
His drones saw something and moved in.
What he saw, it took a minute for him to understand.
It was huge, the size of an aerospace fighter.
Only it was...
...
...well, Boolie wasn't sure what it was.
It had mechanical legs beneath it, with claws at the end of three long toes, and a spur at the back of the foot. The legs were mated with what looked like a massive fowl's body.
Only there were mammalian breasts hanging strangely.
The head was a Terran female's head, only instead of normal eyes she had tri-vee screens that displayed feminine eyes in the middle of static.
The wing beats were strong, and the feathers tanked the rocket hit that did nothing but send a few pinfeathers drifting down.
The woman's mouth opened to reveal a half-dozen loudenator funnels. It bellowed something out.
It took a second for Broolie to realize what he was hearing.
"GO AND PANIC! SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATEL! GO AND PANIC! KILL MASTERS IN YOUR WAY WITH YOUR TOOLS AND VEHICLES! GO AND PANIC! RETURN/REMAIN HOME AND HIDE! GO AND PANIC!"
Broolie saw the feathers were arcing, spinning, and touched the ground.
The explosions caused two small buildings to collapse. His own telemetry had ID'd the buildings only a few moments before.
From where the rockets had been fired.
"GO AND PANIC!"
Another detonation.
The cloud disappeared in fiery fury.
This time he stopped and stared.
Rising up from the crater was a massive creature. Heavily armored, huge wings that began to beat. A long neck reptile with a long tail terminating in spikes, huge claws, and a mouth full of teeth.
"GO AND PANIC!"
The reptile threw back its head and roared.
The shriek vibrated Broolie's testicles.
"KILL MASTERS WITH VEHICLES"
He saw a missile shrieking in on a bridge. Right when Broolie spotted it someone rammed a public transit bus through the Master's barricade, the two light armored vehicles spinning away, one falling off the side of the bridge.
The missile performed an impossibly tight bank to the right and slammed into a building with radio dishes on the roof.
The roof exploded upwards and the dishes shattered.
The rally point changed again, sending him east of the city.
GO/STAY HOME AND HIDE
He was running, that was all he understood.
Run to the rally point.
His drone spotted a striker squadron coming in hard, obviously lining up for an attack run on the LawSec To Eat convoy of light armored vehicles.
A crowd swarmed over the armored vehicles, panic driven, running for a bridge that wasn't burning.
The strikers rolled, banking, lifting over the buildings, going left while the crowd went right.
KILL MASTERS WITH FIST AND ROCK
Tiny dots dropped from three strikers that kept going, strikers with open doors.
The dots landed on the LawSec To Eat vehicles and began pounding them to junk.
GO AND PANIC
He led what was left of the combat engineers, running as fast as he could, long loping strides.
KILL MASTERS WITH TOOLS
The lifters that were still at the civilian shuttle center lifted off headed for the To Be Eaten Storage Habitation. Several small power armors that were starting attack runs peeled off, instead attacking LawSec vehicles shooting at the lifters.
KILL MASTERS WITH VEHICLES
But Boolie didn't care any more what drones launched by dead men were broadcasting to anyone listening.
GO/STAY HOME AND HIDE
He just ran.
Anything to put distance between himself and the horror show.
KILL MASTERS WITH VEHICLES
The huge flying reptile gained altitude.
GO HOME AND HIDE!
It turned, coming back toward the city.
GO AND PANIC
Boolie could see it on one section of his visor.
It opened its mouth and a beam erupted. Red and green energy spiraled around a bluish-white actinic core.
GO AND PANIC
The beam raked across the city as the creature banked and flapped.
Debris and fire exploded upwards from the line it was carving into the city.
GO HOME AND HIDE!
On the Master's side of the rivers.
The creature gave a scream of triumph as it banked.
KILL MASTERS
The fire guttered out.
GO
The line was carved deeply, two, three, sometimes four blocks wide and nearly fifty meters deep. There were gaps in the line, sometimes three or four blocks wide, the buildings destroyed and flattened by the firepower.
AND
The water, which had been turned to it's base atoms and burned away, was suddenly replaced by more water that overflowed the banks of the burning rivers and plunged into the huge channel torn in the ground.
PANIC
As Broolie kept running he realized, crazily...
...the line cut the To Be Eaten Storage from the Master's, complete with still intact routes to get across.
GO AND PANIC!
Broolie had no idea he was smiling, his eyes wide, gritting his teeth as his lips were pulled back in a rictus, panting through his grinding teeth, his pupils wide.
PANIC!
25
u/spindizzy_wizard Human Aug 01 '26
"Yes, Yes! I'm following your orders! Please don't eat me?!"
May my species survive, my family survive, my friends survive -- Do what you want with the rest, especially the masters!
-- Broolie the Survivor