Vivisector paused long enough in his planning to tell his scouts speaking to the battlecrabs that the conflict between them was increasinly seeming a tragic first-contact misunderstanding. It happened, sadly not that infrequently and often with far less willingness to negotiate between the sides.

It was, he had them explain, a situation exacerabted by the presense of the Azura, who the Aotrs had initially had been manipulated into believeing were part of the Azura (not strictly true, but also mot 100% inaccurate). The Azura were clearing using both of them against each other to weaken them both, so they could steal what the Aotrs now realised was not an abandoned ruin, but a place of inportance to a living culture. In fact, if they could deal with the Azura, it stood to reason that their two cultures might have some common ground beyond the mutual enemy, since the Aotrs were also big into post-funeray rituals, just from a slightly different angle. And by dint of what they did the Aotrs were quite keen on archeology and has a lot of museums, so they fully appreciated the situation. 

(A surprising number of musuems, it must be observed, patroned by Kemala Axea's wide-ranging Renaissence-Berserker pursuits...)

He was working on the basis that even if they had to sacrifice some or all of the stuff they'd found in the ruins (returning it to its rightful place), if they could finagle access to the ruins anyway to look with nondestructive ethods, it would be almost as useful. And an apparently planet-bound group of aliens was much easier to accomodate and deal with than a very large hostile empire...

He added that the Azura were clearly on their way to steal what was in the prison/museum/site and any help they could provide would be beneficial - given that the Azura clearly wanted to play the against each other, Vivisctor thought that perhaps the Aotrs and the Tides ought to do the opposite and collaborate to push the Azura off and then (politely) settle their issues in a civilised manner.

(It was worth a shot, he felt.)



In the meantime, Vivisector elected not to pursue the wounded knight. If the Ceronians continued to be professional, they'd have soildly covered the retreat, and Vivisector did not have the numbers for an assault in any case. The defence had bought what it needed - time - for Killstorm to regain enough mana to get them out of there.

He solidified the defences, moving the line a bit further back, littering the former nfantry positions with as many boody-traps and explosives - and re-animated (non-Battlecrab) corpses from the previous battles - as possible. The last battle had, at least, given them plenty of those. While animated dead were fundamentally hopeless on the modern battlefield, there was a small chance that en masse they would at least cause the Ceronians some dela in taking the positions.

The bulk of the remainig defence would solidly be from the surviving Enragers support by what War Droids were left. His own proper infantry were withdrawing back to the site itself.

	*	*	*	*	*	*

Velinkar sighed. "Worth a thought, but no, it seems. I could give them all the information we have on the UCDR, but it doesn't amount to much and they're probably too far away as a power for the biomancers to get at.

"I mean, we COULD point them at the Shardan" (there was no question of pointing them at the Manual Fighters - who Would Find Out and that wasn't worth thinking about - the Shardan would find out too, but the Aotrs were already enemies, so it mattered a bit less) "but aside from getting the biomancers killed a lot, I don't think that would be helpful." (And they didn't know where the Blasted Legion were hiding, the Yrgynela were elusive... And the Cybertanks and everone else way too close for comfort, since Velinkar, if he could not get any local strikes, rather wanted the Azura to be Far Away from the Aotrs, preferrably for a few centuries...)

"What about the Strayvians? We have quite a bit of information on those," (but didn't basically everyone?) "and we're fairly certain we have some idea of where the Dominion space is now concertrated. Would that be enough...?" It seemed, of course, reasonably likely that the Azura would have had run-ins with the Strayvians before, during the Empire period at least, given how stupidly large the Empire had gotten.

Actually, the thought of the Azura knights coming up against the Empire-Era Strayvian super-villains/mad science was (if somewhat dated), a rather hilarious one and the Azura might even somehow appeciate the fist-waving and "I'll get you next times" that would likely result...