Chương 194: Nova Wars - Chapter [CONNECTION SUCCESSFUL!]

I didn't care. It wasn't about the future. It was about surviving that very moment. Nothing else mattered. Not tomorrow. Not a week into the future. Not even the next hour. There was only that singular shining moment. Anything else was something I couldn't even comprehend existing. -Yethy Tearloss, Veteran of the Mar-gite Siege of Cygnus-Orion You'll pay for this mischief in this life or the next!

- Age of Bronze Curse, Terra Well then, stack right the fuck up, Huckleberry - The Holiday Doctor, Battle of Tombstone Ridge, Terrasol Hahpi'mo'o lunged up to her feet as her brother slumped. She scrabbled forward, the tiles of the shelter floor slick for a long moment, then she lunged at the wall. She slapped all four hands against the wall, bracketing the built-in shielded Tri-Vee.

"GET UP!" she screamed, tears running down her face.

"GET UP!" She put her long face against the plastic covering over the Tri-Vee.

"GET UP!" she screamed, the two words coming from deep inside, from her heart. Behind her, laying on the padding someone had put on the floor, littles laying against her flanks and held in her arms, Azzy's mother stared at the screen. Her lips moved as she echoed her daughter's words in a whisper.

"Get up, Azzy, get up," slipped from her lips so quietly it didn't even disturb the podling in her arms. Azzy's knees buckled, his finger let off the trigger. On either side the two Solarians struggled to their feet, roaring in anger. No words, no meaning, just loud vocalizations of hatred, malevolence, and denial. There was a thrum in the air that wobbled like the very atmosphere had turned to gelatin. He heard it suddenly. Faintly. Not audible. Not a sound near him.

Not a sound that carried over the screams of dying buildings, the thudding roar of distant atomic explosions, the pounding of invisible hammers on his face and chest. But he heard it all the same. get up, Azzy He barely heard it. But he heard it. get up His finger, which had started to slack off the trigger, tightened and he started firing the weapon in the tight sideways figure-8 he'd learned.

He didn't squeeze off the bursts like earlier, but clamped his finger down and let the LMG howl as it reverted to the belt of chemical propellant cartridges. Brass and frangible links poured out the other side. The other Lanaktallan heard it. Whispered so quietly most of them didn't hear it. get up Breaker threw back his head and howled in rage.

"GET OUT OF MY HEAD!" the roar was primal, furious. The other Solarians picked it up. The fire from the adhoc squad picked back up. The tentacled alien in the bubble screeched, waving its hand. There was an explosion of purple sparks. The Terran on Azzy's left was slammed backwards hard enough he flew through the air to crash against a dumpster and fall to the ground. The Mar-gite kept coming and Azzy concentrated on keeping them back.

get up Breaker yanked a pin and threw the AM with the gold and purple dotted lines.

"FOOF OUT!" Yee screeched. The rocket hit the front of the bubble, coating it in FOOF that happily started burning anything it touched. Satan's Kimchi even liked phasic energy. The grenade went off at the three second mark. Three long, eternal seconds. Gold sparkles fountained through the air. The purple snap of phasic crackers went off. The bubble collapsed. The thing was suddenly coated in FOOF. It crashed to the ground in a burning lump that spread the fire to the Mar-gite on either side. Azzy kept firing.

"GET BACK ON THE LINE, STAB YOUR EYES!" Breaker yelled. Volunteer Nazzy ran over next to Breaker, crouching down. He had a dented helmet on his head, the fibrous inner layer pulled out in a tuft from where his helmet had saved his life from a Mar-gite dart. His uniform was dirty, greasy, and torn here and there.

"Radio's up!" he yelled. His head was still ringing from his cybernetic hearing aid, implanted when he was a child and nearly forgotten about, had shrieked for a good two seconds. Breaker grabbed the mic, lifting it up to his lips. Azzy couldn't hear him over his weapon. The humans that had stood up or started forward dropped back into position. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

stayin alive stayin alive ah ah ah ah stayin alive Breaker threw an orange smoke grenade, the grenade landing on the thickening layer of dead and twitching Mar-gite. It started hissing. The hissing was coming from at least three different places as the person in the chair blinked, wiping their face. The plug at the base of their skull twisted, going live. A screen came to life in front of them.

A stellar system with three habitable planets, all with populations in the tens of billions, most of them the species that enjoyed close proximity and habitats. Mar-gite clusters incoming. Not the normal ones. These ones were ten, a hundred, a thousand times larger. fuck the whisper was loud in the silence of the darkened area. Something hissed and sparked. Not enough to overcome the luminance of the 2D cathode ray screen. A thin arc of red sparks hissed into the air and went out before they touched anything.

The screen showed the estimations of the amount of Mar-gite each cluster could hold. The screen zoomed out to show the small trickle of eight stellar systems that led through the twisting gravitational pulls, hyperspace sheers, and jumpspace rapids. There were three just outside it that could be reached through more esoteric methods. There was an estimation of literally tens of thousands of Mar-gite 'super-clusters' coming down on those three systems. It shifted in again.

There were quick half to full second shots of panicked volunteer brigades being put together with basic trainings that only lasted a few hours. Desperate fights. On the ground. In the air. In space. Then the Odin arrived. The Death-Kawaii Captain of the Odin appeared.

"Welcome back, Commander," the dead teenage girl said. Her eyes were colder than the white glaze over them would normally allow.

"The situation is desperate." The Commander nodded, her eyes feeling sandy and gritty.

"You have no reinforcements. The amount of Planetary Defense left are miniscule," the Death Kawaii Captain adjusted the polished brim of her scorched hat with the tip of her crop.

"Good luck, Commander." The inside of the pod went live as the screen switched. Jane. My name is Jane, she thought. Her hands were already moving, banging on F2 and DEL. The computer screen flashed to BIOS and her fingers flew over the keys, dropping response lag, increasing polling speeds, increasing teraflops and qbit terapulse. In less than 5 seconds she'd rebuilt the BIOS settings on muscle memory alone and the computers rebooted, skipping the POST screen, bypassing a multitude of tests.

Twenty-three seconds and she'd reached out and grabbed a warm can of Bingo Cola TASTE THE UNICORN VOMIT RAINBOW!, cracked it open, and slugged down half of it, ignoring the sparkling iridescent glitter it left on her lips. Everything went live and she looked it over in less than a 10th of a second. One unit active. Nothing in the queue. Mass tanks at full with deadspace matter and dark matter.

She labeled the sole active construction unit 'dumbass' with one hand that danced across the worn keys with fresh agility, the other flicking through the context menus with the actual clicker mouse. A screen came on. It showed ships of chrome that looked like pumpkin seeds to her. For a moment she could taste pumpkin pie and smell roast turkey. The memory shattered and was swept away before it could fully form. Those were new. She'd fought the Mar-gite on a hundred worlds during the Mar-gite War.

She'd never seen those. Another set of ships. Hexagons with flat top and bottom, connected to other hexagons by hexagonal shafts. From each side of the hexagon in the middle was a single pillar that connected to an outer hexagon. Those hexagons connected to one another by a hexagonal tube. The whole thing was a ring of six hexagons, with a stack of three in the middle of the ring, the middle hexagon connected to the six of the ring by a tube. She nodded. Basic geometry.

The kind that could be found in some mineral deposit formations depending on gravity and magnetic shifts. Then the creatures. All of them looked separate but she quickly noted the similarities. Tentacles with barbs, hooks, and stingers. Bowl-like bottom sections of the body being a cone. She nodded, her brain seeing the mathematical patterns in them. artificial creatures she thought to herself. Her fingers were still dancing. Then a slow motion representation of a bright white flash.

Electronics and computer equipment failing. Not silicon over metal 'micro' chips. Not wiring. But anything more advanced than 5nm chips blew out. Five nano-meter to ten nano-meter chips were at risk. She did a multi-key press macro and reprioritized her manufacturing orders. you could have told me this prior Dumbass ran out an put up the hard-light projections of a genetic/bio-printer facility and began spraying matter slush into it. Dippo came out of the fabricator, looking different than his brother.

He had a large tank on top of his head that looked like something had squished a globe. Inside was a big fish with a couple of decorations in the tank. The body was large, covered in spikes, and looked more for combat than construction. She kept working. An armory. Research labs. A mechanical shop. quickly quickly she whispered. She'd been awake for nearly sixty seconds. The first auto-tank rolled off the line. A BOLO Mark IV. She reached out and pulled the lever. Dorkus ran out and began building.

Five seconds later Malorkus ran out and began helping Dorkus. Ninety seconds and she had helicopters in the air and prop driven planes waiting. The barracks cracked open and five dozen cat-girls sprinted toward their vehicles. The massive Babbage Mark I Computing Facility came online at 105 seconds. Other screens came online. More data flooded in. The huge gears and pistons of the Babbage System cracked the security codes of the still functioning satellites in less than 10 seconds. An eternity.

She already had piping to the nearest water source. She had sixteen drills going for aquifier water. She had sixteen buried landfills she was shoveling into mass grinders. She was alternating between high tech, low tech, and dead tech. A Mark II Computing Facility came online at 120 seconds. She glanced. The Mar-gite hadn't noticed her yet. Autoguns were deploying. Some were dead tech run. Others were high tech. The biplanes had taken off at 110 seconds, their propellors whirring.

Completely invisible to Mar-gite, even if graviton blades were used. The engines were laser-induced fission heated steam engines. The entire thing might be high tech materials, but it was dead tech that drove it. One of the cat-girls pulled her. 45 semiautomatic pistol free and fired two shots in the air. Her rear gunner waved the flags. Her wing banked, following her. Jane knew it only by the icons on her screen. She was coming up on 150 seconds.

Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb rushed out, threw the hard light out, and began spraying the matter into place for the massive docks. She'd build frigates and corvettes first, then destroyers and cruisers. She had research going to decrypt and decompress the deep level deadspace storage templates. This was going to be a fight she had fought a thousand times. There were new variables. There was always new variables. But most of them died just like the old variables.

The Enemy Only Exists to Be Destroyed The battlecry roared through space, vibrating the hulls of the vessels as yet another naval vessel erupted from a dark matter spot that had spread then bulged. Kra'akenwulf didn't even spare it much more than a cursory glance.

"THEY GO NO FARTHER!" roared out as the massive ship shed dozens, scores, then hundreds of parasite craft.

"Designate Tactical-Sixteen on that friendly," he said, not taking his attention from the holotank, which was struggling to keep up with all of the combatants.

"Sixty more point sources have warped in, all Tetra or higher!" came the call.

"Felt Marines are engaging borders," came another call.

"Task Force Pink Window is re-engaging into the fight," another statement.

"Task Force Masskar is reporting in position. They report they are dropping charges to eliminate any Mar-gite." Kra'akenwulf nodded, staring at the holotank. He could see the Terran construction ships moving in on the gas giants, with one already there. He could see the smaller pips coming off of it, moving to slowly encircle the gas giant at the far edge of the system. We need those static defense emplacements up. We can't keep up this pace forever, he thought.

Azzy hunched down behind the berm as the strikers came in close.

"YES! YES! YES!" he heard the reporter yell out. He looked and saw her pointing, the camera pointed up into the air. He looked up and stared. They were dual stacked winged, open cockpit. They had canisters underneath the fuselage and the wings. They fired heavy guns first, two barreled guns on the nose, behind the propellor. The guns hit the Mar-gite, who exploded into chunks. The rounds were heavy 5cm rounds that exploded on contact, turning not only the Mar-gite they hit but the other Mar-gite into chunky salsa.

Then they released the canisters, which fell slowly through the air. When they hit, FOOF backed napalm exploded. Crazily, Azzy realized the rear striker of the formation had a banner streaming behind it. It had a moon-faced cat-eared girl on each side. In the middle was a simple message.

"KEEP IT UP! YOU'RE DOING GOOD!" Then they were past. Azzy wanted to cheer, but he just let off the trigger, let the barrel cool. He smiled through cracked lips. In the bunker, his sister laid her head on her mother's side, crying with relief.