Chapter 574: Interlude (1/2)

”Many believe that when we ask one another 'where were you when you saw the Hasslehoff' that it is some kind of exclusion for those who have not. That we use that to judge those who never saw or rode that rude beast.

”Nay.

”The war was terrible and the Mad Lemurs of Terra fought on a thousand worlds, tens of thousands of worlds, threw hundreds of millions into the fray. To say it is terrible is an understatement, you had to have seen the Hasslehoff to fully embrace and understand the horror.

”The Mad Lemurs of Terra were throwing back everyone who came at them. First the Precursor Autonomous War Machines, then my people, then the Atrekna and their vile Dwellerspawn.

”Nothing slaked their wrath.

”Even in Death, they reached out from the grave, grasping their killers with cold dead hands and whispering to them: This grave has room for you.

”To us, their allies, they reached out. A cold ghost, beautiful and terrible of form, holding out the poisoned fruit of wrathful knowledge. To us, they whispered: Mutually Assured Destruction. You can always take them with you.

”As long as you were willing to go to the lengths they were.

”And what horrible lengths they could be to ensure there was room in the grave.” - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

The Atrekna in the system had spent an inordinate amount of effort to take the system from the Mad Lemurs of Terra's allies. To the Atrekna it was almost as if the madness of the lemurs was infectious, some kind of strange contagion that made perfectly sensible sentient beings nothing more than a husk wrapped around never ending wrath and rage.

The Atrekna had landed with enough force to bring forward temporal copies of the Atrekna who had subdued the system back when it had been wrested from the Hive Lords, planning on utilizing their knowledge of warfare in the Young Universe to enable them to achieve victory with all due speed.

The Ancient Ones reeled back in the face of the screaming wrath that infected every sentient being in the system. Some fled, seeking solace in forgotten spaces that not even the Old Ones knew about. Some stayed, trying to advise the Old Ones and the Young Ones on fighting the feral life of the New Universe. Still others silently watched, keeping their own counsel, as the fighting raged.

The Atrekna had sunk the system as soon as possible in the hopes that it would keep the ferals from bringing in reinforcements, but nothing seemed to stop them. They temporally shifted and copied horde after horde of slavespawn, armada after armada of autonomous war machine spacecraft, army after mechanical army of ground based autonomous war machines.

The feral life of the New Universe did not care. They just kept fighting, kept screaming.

Kept killing.

The Ancient Ones warned the Young Ones to be careful drawing slavespawn from the pools of the past, but the Young Ones, full of knowledge that they were born into the New Universe and so would rightfully inherit it, informed the Ancient Ones that perhaps they would be better served meditating on how they lost their war and to leave the Young Ones to theirs.

A week later the Ancient Ones were proven right when a T-shift of a horde of slavespawn suffered a grave miscalculation. The insectiod creatures who resembled but were not the Hive Lords had crossed the area repeatedly during the fierce fighting in vast hordes numbering in the tens of thousands.

When the Young Ones pulled through a batch of slavespawn they also pulled forward a screaming mass of heavily armed and armored insectiods that immediately set to attacking everything in sight, screaming their war cries.

The Old Ones and the Ancient Ones, who expended much efforts and energy to destroy that unit, flayed the Young Ones alive for their stupidity and wiped out the Young One's genetic lines.

Meanwhile, the 8585th Treana'ad Infantry Horde ran roughshod over a tenth of the massive Pangaea continent. The Young Ones again learned to fear the shriek of the Tasty-Freeze Missile as the Old Ones and the Ancient Ones punished the Young Ones by forcing them to be present on the battlefields.

Worse, word had come back that the Prime System was under heavy assault by a single lemur clad in heavy power armor. Reports of reality instabilities, phasic backlashes, and even stranger things were coming back to those who still had communication with the Prime System.

Many of the Young Ones felt that the Old Ones had made a huge mistake with the archeo-evolutionary reversion of the lemurs. The Ancient Ones had confirmed through meditation, discussion, and examination of evidence that the ferals, known as the Mad Lemurs of Terra, had cunningly prepared for the eventuality of their own demise.

They had released all of their scientific and technological information to their allies. The Ancient Ones had confirmed such a thing in esoteric ways that the Young Ones did not understand. Some Young Ones believed that the Ancient Ones could access the thoughts and memories of the cerebral tissue they consumed, as the Ancient Ones would feast on captured enemies and then meditate.

The Ancient Ones whispered to the Old Ones and the Young Ones that would listen that the Mad Lemurs of Terra had done even worse.

The single Terran on the Prime System that was tearing the planet down around the Atrekna's ears was never meant to be recovered, was never meant to be supported, was never meant to be saved.

It was something known as a ”Suicide Mission.” A wholly alien concept to the Atrekna, who prized survival after tens of millions of years in the dead universe.

The Ancient Ones believed that the attack had no surgical targets, was not aimed in any way except for to destroy everything in the Prime System that it could. The Mad Lemur was immune to temporal anchoring and replay, was immune to temporal shifting, and responded with a burst of chronotrons that showered out in a glittering spray that was visible across the galactic arm spur in real time.

The Ancient Ones believed that the sole Mad Lemur was little more than a weapon that was something called 'use until destroyed' and pointed at the fact that slavespawn were also used in such a way.

The Young Ones pointed out that the ferals had never before shown such disregard for any members of their species, often going to extreme lengths to support and protect one another.

The Ancient Ones ignored the Young Ones, referring to them as 'the chatter of primitive creatures unaccustomed to thought' in their private meetings.

8585 overrran an Atrekna research station where the Atrekna scientists were attempting to understand lemur biology, to little results. It had been some kind of research facility and industrial facility that made the giant war machines that the lemurs had piloted. Some kind of biological and mechanical fusion with a single pilot for each of the war machines, with a strange power source that the Atrekna had identified as being part of the larger ground based slavespawn.

The huge war machines were nearly a hundred meters tall, outfitted with slavespawn battlescreen projectors, ichor producing organs, and power sources, melded with lemur technology that the Atrekna were struggling to understand due to the differences between the New Universe and the Old Universe.

The 8585 overran the facility and then dug in heavily.

They knew there was no retreat. There was no surrender. There was just grim duty and the fact that each of the Treana'ad that made up the Infantry Horde knew that even though they had died once, they now had the opportunity to line their graves with the bodies of the enemy.

The Atrekna were outraged. The insect creatures had taken multiple Atrekan Young Ones alive, even a handful of Old Ones and a single Ancient Ones.

Their screams could be heard across the planet and the Atrekna knew the insect people were doing unspeakable things to their prisoners.

The Atrekna, from their large city in the middle of the Pangaea continent, ordered all of their military forces to crush the Treana'ad Infantry Horde. They had to be extra careful, as instability in the timeline due to the connection to the Prime World and the havoc the Mad Lemur was wreaking made it difficult to focus properly.

One Quorum of Young Ones accidentally brought up thousands of cyborg Herd Lords, who rampaged across the continent in fire, blood, and atomic devastation to join the insects. Together the Herd Lords and the New Hive pressed the Atrekna back.

The screams from the Atrekna prisoners were strangely muffled, but still audible.

The cyborg Herd Lords and the New Hive troops were slowly pushed back, step by step, toward the research facility until they were only a few hundred paces from the building itself. They dug in even harder, filling the air with point defense and missile defense systems. They moved through tunnels, fired from heavily fortified positions, and sallied forth to flank any serious thrusts.

The Atrekna could see that the New Hive and the Herd Lords were losing, slowly, but their extinction was inevitable.

The screams from the captured Atrekna were muffled, but still began drawing in every slavespawn and autonomous war machine on the planet. The Young Ones in charge of the slavespawn and the AWM forces found that their attempts to drive their forces back were ignored as the forces from all over the planet converged on the research facility on the edge of the vast crystalline metropolis.

The New Hive and the Herd Lords kept fighting. Kept repulsing wave after wave of slavespawn and AWM. The Young Ones and Ancient Ones learned quickly that the Old Ones were right in not getting anywhere near the battlefield.

For too many of the Young Ones and Ancient Ones for the Atrekna's comfort, the last thing they heard was the high pitched shriek of a Tasty-Freeze Missile right before it reduced anything in its path into a fine mist and purple salsa.

The stalemate lasted for nearly a year, back and forth, pushing outward then being forced back, with more and more areas becoming contaminated by ravaging Lemur Ally troops to the point where even the outer system wasn't safe.

A replication of PAWM forces between the 11th and 12th planet resulted in bringing forward copies of the Hive Lord and Herd Lord PAWM in the midst of fighting a handful of crazed lemur ships. The Atrekna were able to destroy the small amount of ships, but at great cost. Worse, the ships had swanned all over the system, making it so that using any temporal flux point in the system ran the risk of trawling forward more Mad Lemurs.

Finally, the New Hive and the cyborg Herd Lords were pushed to within paces of the walls of the research facility and the Atrekna could feel the taste of victory at the tips of their feeding tentacles.

With a clattering and chattering of stripped gears and worn rusty chains, three Substance W doors rolled up into the wall.

The Atrekna felt it.

A trio of screams, intermingled with the screams of the lost Atrekna, overlaid with the enraged howling fury of a denied child.

From the doors thundered three huge warmechs. Nearly a hundred meters tall, one in blue armor with white accents and what looked like tall pylons extending from the shoulders, the second was purple with green highlights and pylons, the third was crimson with accents of orange and yellow with pylons above the shoulders.

All three were carrying heavy six barrel miniguns that were already getting up to speed.

The Atrekna initially rejoiced. Three defenders remained, the New Hive and the cyborg Herd Lords could be ignored by the Atrekna themselves so that the Atrekna could take control of the new weapons.

The Old Ones fled the field at the grinding roar of pure enraged fury mixed in the agonized screams Atrekna and maternal wrath they could feel reaching out from the three massive warmechs. They were mocked as they fled by the Young Ones and many of the Ancient Ones, both factions sure that they could overcome whatever tricks the New Hive and the cyborg Herd Lords could have come up with.

The Young Ones reached out eagerly to gain control of the warmech and snuff out the conscious thought of the pilots.

Instead they found madness. Screaming adolescent fury, despair, agony, and full throated rage poured from the controlling minds. Slavespawn neural signals were full of pain and despair, enslaved by the soul crushing will of the maternal fury that fed off of the agony and horror of the muffled Atrekna signal.