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An excerpt from the Great War By Strega

Lurha was dying noisily on the combat channel, and Hsaa couldn't bring himself to cut it off.

Lurha was a big, tough falan - they were all big and tough, but he more than most - but a very lucky or very well aimed plasma gun shot had punched between the flank plates of his suit in just the wrong spot, piercing the brain beneath his middle set of legs and his rear heart. If it were only that he might heal, given unlimited time; Commonwealth soldiers are full of combat micro- and nanotech, and even now swarms of medical microbots were trying to keep him alive and rebuild the damaged issue.

But it was not just a penetrating wound. It took plenty of power to get through the centimeter-thick hullmetal of his combat suit and the "muscle" and padding layers below that. A lot of that energy went into vaporizing metal and flesh. Lurha was cooked where he lay, the middle third of his big body sizzling inside the armor. With only the little brain in his skull, the one that controlled his senses but was no smarter than a cat's, there was barely enough nervous control to scrabble his forepaws on the deck. Hullmetal foreclaws powered by sinewy limbs and suit muscles gouged the armored floorboard. Luckily the big meson cannon on his back was smart enough to shut down in the absence of a controlling intellect. Hsaa had already tried to remotely slave the gun to his suit - they needed the firepower with both falan in the squad dead - but some connection was cut between the suit antennas and gunmind.

Lots of comms were out. Arowan's Shipmind hadn't spoken to them in...fifteen minutes? Since the last spinal battery shot had punched through the command ship. Glory Of Arowan was still alive and still under control; not thirty seconds before the decks had twitched as missiles launched, and even this deep inside the ship they felt the lesser vibrations as energy turrets and point defense fired. Odds were the shipmind and command crew were fine - relatively - but the local repeaters were down. A dead area in the half-alive, half-metal vessel, one of many.

Hsaa didn't have time to worry about that. He finally, regretfully cut Lurha out of the channel. He'd served with the stolid but endlessly loyal and sometimes unintentionally hilarious hexawoozle for six years and he'd mourn later.

With that hissing wail cut off the rest of the channel came in clear and Norrul was screaming at him.

There were only four of them left out of the original nine. T'k, a xsir supervisor not at all suited for battle; his little crablike body rode atop Hsaa's back and did its best to fire a much too large Gauss gun. The others were himself, his long-time mate Kayna and Norrul, a fellow Mrish from the security section.

Norrul was the only Marine left in the scratch-built squad and both of them outranked him, but he was also the only one with real suit-combat experience. Kayna was supposed to be in her Control section but was cut off from the shipmind when the first bolt punched through the hull and Hsaa was by trade a linguist and secondarily a mechanic. Norrul yelled and Hsaa jumped to obey.

"Hsaa, get that cannon slaved or we're dead! Stop fucking around!" His paralysis had only lasted a few seconds, long enough for Kayna and Norrul to pick off the last of the enemy 'bots in the corridor, but red dots on his HUD showed that more were on the way. Somehow one or more assault shuttles had gotten close enough to dock, or entered through Arowan's rent hull, and the section was swarming with combat 'bots. The nuclear dampers and local suppression fields must be up, since they were still alive and not vaporized by a bot-carried scuttling charge, but that didn't keep the boarding party out of the corridors.

He'd never seen an actual Enemy before. Few had and lived; the Ylesh were huge tentacled beings half of energy, half of almost-flesh, that lived on the mental emanations of others. Soulsucks, they called them; they could, and did, kill millions by pulling the life and minds from their prey from a distance. Their unnatural, partly other-dimensional bodies were incredibly durable. If even one entered the ship the command crew would instantly scuttle Arowan. Even a command ship and its crew was not too high a price to pay for the life of one of the Enemy.

But powerful as the Ylesh were they were few in number. There were fewer now that the falan had been recruited into the war. The big six-legged weasels were resistant to the soulsuck - that was, after all, why they were forcibly Uplifted - and in sufficient numbers they would swarm around their prey and tear the Ylesh to bits.

What the Ylesh did to them in return Hsaa did not know, but falan who fought them claw to tentacle were never quite the same. Powered armor and their innate resistance did not fully protect them from the soulsuck. Some died in their suits, apparently untouched, or went irretrievably mad; others survived only for fur to slough off and rashes and sores to grow in its place. Still others were seemingly unharmed, but...distant. Still strong, still willing to fight, but never all there. A fair percentage of those committed suicide, either immediately or even years later. Half the entire species had been expended against the Enemy and despite all the cloning and breeding facilities it remained to be seen whether their kind would outlive the Ylesh.

But after a century of war the tide was finally turning. The Enemy had underestimated the Commonwealth. Squabble though they would - there were always a hundred minor wars abrew in the galaxy - the thousands of races that made up the Commonwealth Of Worlds were bound by ancient bonds and drew together in the face of extinction. As star systems and entire sectors were lost hidden War Worlds, massively industrialized and automated factories devoted entirely to ship and weapon construction and not used at their full capacity for a hundred thousand years - since the _last_galactic invasion - were reactivated. When that was not enough, weapons long since designed but too terrible to ever use were extracted from hidden vaults and used unstintingly.

Supernovae were induced by suicide ships carrying forbidden weapons, their all-volunteer crews darting past enemy flotillas to immolate themselves in the giant stars powering the stargates.

The Xsir, small and inoffensive and frankly stupid individually, rose up and showed why they were the first among equals among the great races. A single xsir was small and humorous and even tasty -looking, if you liked king crab for dinner, but six of them with legs and minds interlinked were smarter than you were. Clusters and Hives of them, whole worlds of Xsir teamed together in towering intellects that outshone even Ship and System Minds. Always the most numerous race, with some systems boasting trillions of this least menacing sapient. People thought they were funny, silly, jokes, a fast breeding, generally short lived, productive but ultimately unimportant race. They were wrong. As massively populated xsir systems churned out war material and xsir hiveminds rose to direct armies and fleets with remorseless precision the Ylesh came to fear them. More than one Enemy fleet was lured in and trapped by the apparent weakness of a xsir system's defenses; the little crab people let the enemy close and inflict unthinkable casualties to kill those ships, and those who had forgotten remembered why they were the foremost of the great races.

With the majority of their permanent Gates destroyed at the Commonwealth end, reinforcements and supplies were cut to the Enemy fleets and the allies were quick to take advantage. The brutal slugging match that followed lasted over eighty years. Temporary Gates powered by artificially exploded supergiant stars in the Ylesh galaxy fed some reinforcements through and the forces already in place wrought havoc. The Ylesh had prepared the invasion for centuries and a less resolute, less united culture would have fallen no matter how many forbidden weapons were used.

But with the fervor borne of utter desperation the races of the Commonwealth banded together and fought. Whole species died and even the cat-like Hestans, arguably the second most powerful polity in the galaxy, were driven back to their core worlds and suffered such losses as to be a minor race once more. After the war many of them returned to their ancestral worlds, so scarred by battle that they renounced technology for a time and lived as little more than farmers.

Minor races like the Mrish, quadrupedal (and sometimes bipedal) sophonts something like a cross between a cat, a skunk and a monkey, rose to prominence as they threw themselves unswervingly into the meat-grinder. Whole generations of mrish, and many other races, rose to adulthood only to die in the never-ending battle.

But with limited supplies and reinforcements available to the Ylesh, massive casualties on both sides favored the defender. Bit by bit the Enemy was ground down, never quite able to get to all of the industrial sectors they needed to destroy to win the war. Capital ships in the thousands died and whole star systems burned as no quarter was asked or given, but as the Ylesh starbases and new-built fortress worlds in the galaxy were crushed one by one there came a time that the Commonwealth was finally able to consider an offensive.

The Enemy had spent its ships and subject races - and its own - like water in the invasion, and as Commonwealth military technology had finally caught up to their adversary's it was thought that there was a window of vulnerability in their defense now. Enough intelligence had been obtained by captured members of subject races - never was a Ylesh taken alive, naturally - and from quislings who had worked for the Enemy to plan an attack. It was a huge risk, since the advantage the defender held was now well understood, but with few exceptions the polities of the galaxy were willing to take that risk rather than let the Enemy live on to invade again. It was now clear that this was a war that would leave in its wake only the winners and the dead.

And so a hundred perfect stars - four with still-inhabited planets - were exploded as one and the Grand Fleet charged through the short-lived Gates. Gates would be built on that end to link to existing permanent ones here, if any of the beachheads survived long enough. The invasion of the Enemy galaxy had begun.

The HUD showed a significant power signature approaching past the corner of the corridor. No sign of reinforcements on their side yet, but Hsaa at least had the skills to jury-rig the meson cannon to his suit. It was too massive to carry, even if he stayed on four legs, but he could leave it on Lurha's still-twitching body and fire it from here. He needed the larger power reserves of the 350-kilo falan's suit to operate it anyway.

He slammed an armored panel shut on the side of the cannon just as the first homing plasmoids came around the corner looking for them. Kayna and Norrah datalinked their suits and took over Hsaa's tailgun and the smartgun on his back as well and picked off the first dozen with ease, exploding the energy globes in midair with precisely aimed fire. T'k with his awkwardly oversized weapon and lack of datalink hit not a one, but his ill-aimed burst drove back the first 'bot that tried to take the corner. Kayna and Norrul were flicking in and out of view as active camouflage and ECM tried to keep the plasmoids that got through from getting a lock. Some were remotely piloted, like small and deadly drones, and those they could try to jam, but the optically and sensor-aimed ones had to be dodged or fooled. The first of those that got through gouged a hole in the bulkhead six meters away, and the energized armor of their suits warded off splinters the size of fingers. T'k, smaller and with thinner armor, lost two legs, but he had those to spare. The mrish only had their four legs and a tail and needed most of those to function.

"Firing!" Hsaa said into the comm, quietly as he could manage, and bit down on the fire-tab he'd slaved to the cannon. Nothing happened...for a second, anyway. Then the cannon reached full charge and a searing flash erupted beyond the corner, sending bits of 'bot ricocheting from wall to wall. The meson gun produced no apparent effect at the source, it was not until the precisely timed stream of mesons decayed that the energy reappeared. It neatly bypassed such trivial things as armor and was properly an antitank weapon, but against anything as small as a mrish or 'bot a near miss was more than enough.

Red dots danced on his HUD as Hsaa searched for a further target. He planted another blast twenty meters further down the next hall and past three bulkheads but couldn't be sure he hit anything. The 'bots must be bringing up jammers because while the shipmap still showed up, he couldn't tell where the enemy was massing. A weapon as indiscriminate as a meson cannon cannot be fired at random, not inside a ship. He needed a target.

The deck lurched underfoot and Hsaa's eyes went wide. That wasn't a concussion from a missile detonation or a beam strike. Something had rammed Arowan!

"Keep firing, Hsaa!" his mate cried, and he sent a speculative shot past a wall and into the space the 'bots had previously occupied. Flying metal limbs showed that he'd hit something, though that might only be junked 'bots. "We have to keep them out of the control decks until the other ships can send help!"

Kayna had been in Command Four when the battle started and had told him that for a change the odds were in their favor. Only eight Ylesh Diamonds stood in the way of six Glory- and two Vendetta- class Command Ships. Vendettas were an early model heavy on beam weapons and armor and protected by massive shields, built early in the war before the kamikaze nature of enemy parasite craft was well understood. Glories were meant more to stay back and launch their great broods of attack ships and fighters, backing them up with long range missile fire and if need be their own potent energy batteries.

Diamonds for their part had little changed since the start of the war. Beautiful and terrifying mountains of metal and crystalalloy shaped like a plumb-bob, they mounted massive spinal energy weapons and launched prodigious swarms of fighters. In the early days of the war the battles against Diamonds had been one-sided slaughters, with the seemingly invincible Enemy motherships advancing though everything the Commonwealth fleets could throw at them to reach optimal beam range.

Times had changed, though, and the combined fire of two Vendettas and missiles from Arowan,Glory Of Kshira and four more Glories converted a Diamond into an expanding sphere of superheated plasma. Return fire fell on the Vendettas, who could surely take it, and then on Kshira when the Vendettas proved frustratingly durable. The Diamonds were and always had been faster than their Commonwealth counterpart and closed at their best speed, knowing that their missile-heavy opponents outclassed them at long range.

Thousands of fighters on each side danced an elaborate ballet, each strikegroup wanting nothing more than to close on a mothership like a swarm of hungry ants but having to deal with the enemy fighter cover first. New-generation Commonweath Claw and Xodia fighters were markedly superior to Ylesh Sliver fighters, which for whatever reason never seemed to get upgraded. The Enemy had settled on a design centuries ago and seemed confident that quantity had a quality all its own.

Slivers were superior in one respect, though: their splinter-sharp crystal hulls were laced with energies that gave them a nearly even chance of penetrating a capital ship's shields, and the few that made it past fighter cover slammed into Kshira. Many exploded against the shields but others penetrated like an awl into flesh and detonations rocked the massive ship as fighters were used as kinetic impactors. Armor took the brunt of it but every remaining Diamond in range opened up simultaneously and Kshira took a dozen spinal mount hits so tightly focused that no mobile platform's shield generator could keep them out.

A massive secondary explosion blew off the right fin of the four-kilometer ship; one of its deeply buried and well armored magazines had been hit by pure chance and the drawback of using antimatter warheads was revealed. There was an automatic ejection system that was supposed to prevent this calamity but it was not perfect and the new graviton-pulse warheads were meant to address the issue when they went into service. None of this helped the crew of Kshira as they died by the thousand. Plasma fires consumed the innards of the heavily armored ship as internal bulkheads failed yet the few weapons that remained fired without a pause, point defense picking off Slivers and missiles still speeding toward the enemy motherships.

Kshira'_s shield bubble flickered and failed and a hail of beams and a few Slivers arrived to finish the job, but two more Diamonds exploded under concentrated missile fire and a third was buried in a cloud of fighters even as the _Vendettas' long range energy batteries pounded its shields flat. A last few heavy warheads from dead Kshira sped past the fighters and detonated in massive gamma ray bursts. Enough antimatter to glass a continent combined with a like amount of matter not a kilometer from the unshielded crystal hull. A light second away the concentrated might of six Glories worth of Attack Ships was chipping away at the enemy fleet, daring them to turn their fire away from the deadly Commonweath capital ships to deal with the swarm of midgets. A quarter of the attack ships mounted fast-firing short ranged missile batteries and were picking off the remaining Slivers with anti-fighter missiles as fast as they could reload.

The enemy died but unlike previous engagements made no effort to withdraw. A heavily industrialized planet was a light minute behind them and they must be sure that the once peaceful Commonwealth would not hesitate to wipe all life from the surface of this and any other Ylesh worlds. History would prove them right with the completion of the first World Burner-class ships the next year, massive vessels designed to crack planetary shields but utterly unable to do so without wiping out the populations beneath.

As enemy and friendly fighters alike died in the fires of an exploding Diamond the remaining four Enemy dreadnoughts concentrated on a Vendetta until it was dead in space and then turned their fire on Glory of Arowan.

The deck lurched again as something impacted on the hull and mighty Arowan shuddered. Hundreds of red dots appeared and disappeared on Hsaa's HUD but it was impossible to tell which were real and which were decoys. The 'bots knew all about the meson cannon now and they were massing for a final assault, but where?

Norrul started to say something just as a plasmoid slipped past their datalink net and impacted the deck a meter from his paws. The blast blew him through the bulkhead and he dropped instantly out of datalink. It was just Hsaa and his mate now.

And T'k. Hsaa didn't notice when the little xsir, a foot tall at the carapace, dropped off his back and scuttled forward. He lacked even active camouflage but with the tempting target of two much larger Mrish and a meson cannon in view the plasmoids barely swerved in flight. The Gauss rifle would only slow him down. He left it behind.

Hsaa was too busy trying to shoot plasmoids to notice the xsir until he nearly shot T'k himself, thinking the scuttling little thing was a smaller than usual 'bot. There was no time to think or call him back and it was not until the xsir's datalink popped up on his screen that he realized what he was doing. Somehow the xsir in his shipsuit, not even properly armored or equipped for combat, had jury-rigged a link.

Small, unthreatening, and often ignored, T'k scuttled around the corner and into full view of the enemy. The meson cannon had torn away half a dozen bulkheads and for an instant he had a view of a hundred 'bots, three plasmoid launchers, and two lumbering tank-bots. The one thing the Enemy lacked was a meson cannon, and that was what would kill them.

A hurricane of fire descended on little T'k as he scuttled to the side to get a better view, obliterating him so thoroughly no fragment of his carapace would remain. He lived just long enough to datalink the location and nature of each of the Enemy to the mrish manning the cannon.