Chapter 573: Interlude (1/2)

The Atrekna descended on another system, eager to add its positioning and resources to their ever growing empire. It fell quickly, being only lightly defended by some of the Herd Lords. There was the wreckage of lemur creations scattered around, but the archeoreversion attack had done its job and done it well enough that even the bodies were buried.

They sunk the system down and adjusted the stellar mass until it was dim and red.

The last of the Herd Lords went down shooting under the red sun, trampling a Young One that had gotten to cocky and thought that it could not be defeated by a desperate Herd Lord. The psionic attacks had come heavy and hard, mind thrusts and ego whips striking his mental defenses hard enough that phasic sparks showered from the Herd Lord's hide. The homing crystals, fired from the Atrekna weapons, shattered on his Substance W armor, the psychic shielding of his helmet let him withstand even insinuations to his id that he was worthless and psychic blasts almost point blank.

Finally he fell beneath heavy psychic crushes, still wildly firing his weapons.

At the very end he reached up onto his combat harness with all four hands and pulled four rings away from canisters.

The explosion took out four more Young Ones and badly wounded an Ancient One who had come to observe the last desperate fight of the last remaining Herd Lord.

Once that was done, the Atrekna turned their attention to the populace and the planet itself.

First, they wiped away the cities, the roads, the industrial sites. The dim sun shown as they destroyed it all, driving the little furry peoples out into the wilderness that the Atrekna had brought up to replace the defeated civilization.

Then they examined the sentient species itself.

It was small, barely half the height of a Herd Lord. Covered in thick warming fuzz, the Atrekna knew that the sentient could survive the cool days and cold nights which were comfortable to the Atrekna. Their minds were fully capable of processing the emotions that the Atrekna fed on. Their slightly chubby bodies contained the caloric reserves to host Atrekna larvae and the horror of what was happening would ensure that the larvae would grow quickly into a well developed Atrekna Young One.

Time passed within the system and the Atrekna let the small creatures for their own civilizations. Build their own rude homes, rude villages, and engage in subsistence farming and ranching. The Atrekna fed on them, gorged at first when presented with billions of sentient creatures to feast upon, but then were as sparing as always. Each Atrekna only ate two or three a month, still far more than they had subsisted on in the Old Universe, but the Young One's logic about indulging in caloric consumption and phasic/psychic consumption was enough of an excuse for even Ancient Ones to indulge.

Reports came in of the little furry creatures engaging in religion, praying to idols, setting up statues in their village squares. They had moved them from where they had lain and put them atop large stone blocks three times the size of the little creatures.

Several of the Young Ones moved out to see it for themselves.

In the small village of only fifty families they found a large black statue of Substance W. Three times the size of small beings, weighing enough that the small beings had been forced to use a careful arrangement of pulleys and ropes to lift it into place.

The years had worn off any painted markings from the statue of the lemur.

The Atrekna examined it. The Substance W still echoed with rage and wrath that was emitted by living lemurs like a weaponized aura, but it was more a grumbling. They could detect complex systems inside, but they were all dead. Even the power core was dead. True, Substance W inhibited phasic examinations, but the Young Ones were sure that the robot had degraded into a mere statue.

They ate a few of the villagers and traveled back to their city of spun glass, crystal, and gleaming stone.

The villagers buried their dead and murmured prayers of hatred and grief to the statues.

Time passed, but the religion remained.

Then one day a child noticed something strange.

On the back of the statue of the God's neck a small light had come on. It was thinner than a fingertip, a line with rounded edges. One by one two others came on above the single amber light. One worshipper felt the statue of the ancient God of their ancestors start to have a slight vibration, almost a tremble and it felt warm to the touch.

In each village the same thing happened over and over.

The Atrekna came to investigate, but found nothing. No apparent power source, just a faint feeling of vibrations. It still stood on top of a stone block twice as tall as the little creatures. There was no sense of life or energy about it, just the slight vibration and the lights on the back of the neck. They chalked it up to Substance W's strange properties, ate some villagers, and returned to their cities.

Time passed.

The middle light went amber the same day the bottom light flashed three times and turned green.

The villagers still knelt at the feet of the stone block slightly taller than one of them that the statues all stood on, their feet sunk several inches into the stone. The fierce face of the lemur skull stared down at the villagers as they worshiped and prayed. It stared silently during the spring and harvest festivals. It contained no judgement, just a stare.

One night one of the small furry creatures noticed something odd as he wandered the village on patrol to make sure no slavespawn entered the village to feast on the occupants or their herd animals.

The eyes were glowing faintly red.

The Atrekna again came out and examined the statues. They did not like touching them, Substance W held the ambient rage and wrath of the lemurs still, even after all the years that had gone by. They examined it closely, but determined that age had made the components inside decay slightly and the red luminescence was nothing more than the rage and wrath contained in the Substance W slowly beginning to decay away. The lemur robots were still, their position unchanged, still on top of the block only half as tall as one of the small creatures.

They ate a few of the villagers and left.

Still the villagers prayed.

Once they were sure that the Atrekna were gone, in each village, across the entire world, knives normally used to sheer creatures, butcher livestock, and slice meat were grasped. In each village a small group went into the houses of the one they knew had told of the miracle.

They dragged the informers out before the statues of the Ancient Gods and slit their throats before shaving them bare and burying them face down so their spirits could never see the sky.

The Atrekna went about their business of continuing the terraforming. In the gas giants of the system the vast growth fields for slavespawn were reaching the point where the much needed biological warships could be created. At other spots in the system the factories were finally reaching the point of being able to produce the larger autonomous war machines. At a precious few spots the biomechanical systems were able to finally fuse machine and flesh into the hybrid war machines that the Atrekna desperately needed.

Outside of the system, the war was going badly. Hesstla still resisted, as did a hundred other systems.

To the Atrekna it was insane. It was as if the lemurs found something sexually provocative about the possession of weaponry and military equipment. Many Atrekna believed that the Mad Lemurs of Terra required the presence of military weaponry and equipment in order to breed, that the female lemurs needed the sexual excitement of participating in or witnessing physical violence in order to become aroused.

At the demands of the Overmind the system was stripped of any and all slavespawn and autonomous war machines as well as any spacecraft that could possibly tip the balance in the Hesstla system, which the Atrekna were in danger of losing possession of permanently.

The Atrekna were unaware that the little furry creatures were digging in the fields they had planted, uncovering what the dirt and crops had hidden.

More statues of lemurs.

Their eyes burned a cold red.

In the forests, the forest dwellers dug beneath the rich loam.

The cold red eyes of the black metal lemurs stared from the dirt.

The little creatures who fished at the rivers dove into the water and brushed away the river sand.

Cold red eyes shone in the dark water.

The little creatures couldn't know what was happening, they were ignorant of the science of small things, trillions of which could hide in the crevices of their pawpads. They were ignorant of the tiny science of cellular regeneration. They could not understand that the sun turning red and the system 'sinking' had an effect that nobody could have foreseen.

The Atrekna had sunk the system, began replicating temporal echoes into present day resources.

[The Universe Dislikes That]

If the Atrekna had asked the Mad Lemurs of Terra, they would have been warned that almost every sentient species in the universe avoided dabbling too deeply in temporal sciences. That the universe itself disliked meddling in time, and it would manifest its displeasure by ensuring that the worst possible outcome for the meddlers was the timeline that would manifest.

But the Atrekna were the masters of time and in their arrogance had never even thought to ask the lemurs a single question beyond ”Why won't you die?”

The Atrekna could sense something was wrong. They were not sure what it was, but it suddenly became an intense effort to even view the resources of the past and almost impossible to replicate something from the past into the present.

With no orbital or system assets, the system was completely undefended. The Overmind ordered all Atrekna in the system facilities to put the system's vast production systems on standby and immediately return to the planet to investigate what the problems were.

Manufacturing facilities and birthing swamps were put in standby slumber as the Atrekna returned. They all turned their attention to what could be causing the temporal weight, the temporal static, that blocked them from almost any temporal mechanics.

Even moving was proving strenuous.