Vivisector watched the battle with keen interest. It had, admittedly caught them all a bit off-guard with the realisation that the battlecrabs were, NOT in fact Azura deployed by the orbital forces as planetary defence, but a third faction. That was the problem with the Azura's determined resistance to traditional technology, there was not the comms chatter to intercept.

He had the remaining specialists see if they could find a way to communicate with the battlecrabs against their common enemy. If that meant they had to sacrifice some of the tubes, so be it; after all, they could legitimately claim innocences - of a sort. 

Sadly, the dead ones were probably dead too long to be able to be raised with Summon Dead, which had a time limitation of roughly fifty years per assessed caster level for that spell. Unless they could find one who had only relatively recently just died (a thousand years, give or take a few centuries), that option was out. (Vivisector considered and dismissed killing one of the living ones solely to perform that task. It was wasteful, especially if they COULD communicate and use the living ones as a bargining chip.

It was, of course, entirely possible they would either not be able to communicate, or their very presense of the preceeding battle had already squashed the idea, but nevertheless, enemy battlecrabs hitting the Azura in the rear was a nice thing to contemplate.

In the meantime, he deployed a tighter defence. The knights were the main problem here. The Aotrs had a veritable plethora of extremely capable individuals compared to most powers - even such long-lived folk as the Elves - due to their tendancy to pick up and retain the best and brightest. However, that didn't mean they were always there all the time, and a small force like this one had, basically, himself and Killstorm and the captain of the Line Infantry, who was not quite on their level. Against normal, mortal foes, any of the three of them could blitz through with horrendous ease, only in any serious danger from actual anti-vehicle weapons.

But the knights seemed more akin to super-powered beings - and even the Aotrs had some problems with superheroes and the like. 
As their upper tiers and the distressing tendancy to spontaneously get TO those upper tiers tended to put them above the levels of even the bottom-end epic casters. Sure, the Aotrs did technically have individuals (aside from the High Command) who could qualify in their own right, but they were VERY small in number and none were present.

So the knights were the biggest problem, due to the damage they could cause. It might be possible he was over-selling them, but after the damage they'd caused thus far, Vivisector was leaning hard on caution. He gave orders to priority target the knights with anti-vehicle weapons when the opporunity arose, working on the basis that not even most superheroes would be able to tank a direct hit from a Hammer of Hatred's can-opener.

In the meantime, the War Droids - of slightly more use here - were set up as a screening force against the enemy infantry. While on the one hand, a close assault was among the easiet ways to deal with War Droids, and this seemed an enemy specialty, on the other, the point of War Droids was ultimately to pin in place the enemy for the Line troopers to attack themselves.

In this instance, Vivisector had pre-planned with the Storm Cleavers (all of which had survived the battle with the battlecrabs) to use their Frost Bombs as an artillery barrage on the War Droid positions. He hoped that the somewhat impetuous knight would charge i8nto sluaghter them (even wth Enrager Mark 1 support), but that while they and the other infantry were doing so, every Frost Bomb the trio carried would be unloaded into the vicinity, turning it into a mist, but most importantly, life-sapping frozen hell. It would no do the War Droids much good either, for that matter, but the Aotrs Lie troopers would be essentially immune to the cold th4emselves and stood a chance of making a killing counter-assault.

And if that worked, the Line troopers would pull back to their previous position, and another group of War Droids would take the place of the first. A classic, if in this case slightly unorthodox, cumbersome and wasteful, ping-pong defence. If it went to plan, Vivisector had enough War Droids to do it twice, but he very much doubted in combining and survivors, that there would be enough War Droids to do it a third time, if even the first time succeeded.

But it was the best shot he'd come up with. And the rest of the Aotrs interlocking defences would hopefully be able to deal with the enemy armour.

	*	*	*	*	*	*	

Velinkar was slightly concerned, but not entirely surprised at Boldness' apparent burgeoning power level. Had he had the conversation with Vivisector, they would have both agreed on the superhero problem. (And these was a reason that the Aotrs specificallt considered teenage girls with magical powers to be a top-tier threat, because they seemed very much most prone to going all, well, they'd all seen the cartoons.)

All the more reason to keep her on the allied side, then. (It was, after all, just barely working with the Manual Fighters...)

(He thus refrained from pointing out how remarkably dumb owls were compared to their reputation... He had done falconry once, a few centuries back.)

Now that he was less concerned with her dashing off alone to deal with the Furnace Knight and actually had a plan, he volenteered the services of the reserved Murder detachment for her use.

A thought occurred. If these were greedy corporate types...

"How likely would we be to get a response if we tried to hire some of THEM?" he asked Boldness curiously. "Because I think Lord Death Despoil might not take it amiss if, for instance, [i]we[/i] offered to hire some of [i]their[/i] local forces to go and, for example, hit the United Concorde of Divine Realms forces here," he indicated Bright Accord Node Station "for us, and what might it cost us?"

Sure, the two-decade-plus streak of victories was somewhat necessary to have been broken at some point, bt that didn't mean the Aotrs as a whole couldn't be creatively petty about taking revenge for it.

He explained the UCDR's heavy reliance on magitech - as a society that likewise seemed to more rely on that than regular tech, the Azura seemed like they would be interested - or at least partly. 

(Also, the already-observed very concerning presense of not only large numbers of Magical Teenage Girls, but the concern that some appeared to have survived and stuck at it long enough to be Magical Middle-Aged Veteran Ladies wuld perhaps give the Azura's thrice-cursed knights a run for their money...)

"Failing that, or in addition to it... Building on your idea of the engineered grudge, if you can locate the most readily intimidatable section - or most cost-conscious - with your assets and the addition of the anti-magic systems we're installing, it seems to me we're in a good position to pull something dirty.

"So far, your Azura divination has blunted our surprise attacks. But if our anti-magic can damp that effect enough, perhaps your Toxicrene can be used to falsify... Whatever it is that you use to report data findings to the person who decides where to go. And we can use that to lure a group out to a promising looking asteroid that they've just been told has some ideal deposits on and hit them without warning. And then leave a false trail behind to whichever subfaction they hate most is. To the sort of effect that they had gotten but withheld the divinatory infomation.

"I don't know how possibly that is, that's how I'd initially be looking at it, using spoofed or hacked sensors and communications with a more regular power."

He looked pensive for a moment.

"Is there any chance your Oratus can have an effect on Tanshin I? Some sort of disruption of defection or something when they start their attack on Brigadier Vivisector's tasks force? I appeciate that it might be too late, or possibly using that asset to early, but it's worth knowing if that option is on the table."