Chapter 575: Interlude (1/2)

”I have seen a Mad Lemur ripped in half still crawl forward with a knife in her teeth to kill the enemy, her eyes glowing red and growling through bubbles of crimson blood. Anyone else would be in endorphin and dopamine shock, fading out on a tsunami of natural opiates.

”A human is born in pain. They live in pain. They die in pain.

”And they're willing to inflict that pain thrice upon anyone who they determine to be the enemy.

”Because the enemy exists only to be destroyed.” - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

The system was sunken deep, the sun dull and red, the light of the star vanishing millions of light years away as if it had never existed. A side effect of the temporal adjustments made it so that the light the star shed just vanished, even if it had been in transit for thousands of years. It vanished with a burst of chronotrons that was detectable even in the Andromeda Galaxy as the light of the star vanished.

The planets had no native species and had never been colonized, settled, or terraformed by the Lanaktallan when they had owned the system. It was a barren place, with silent testimony to the ferocity of the First Precursor War across the scarred and barren planets. Some planets had fossil records that showed that at one time three of the planets had been swarming with life.

They had all been obliterated over a hundred million years ago.

The Lanaktallan had, at one time, possessed massive industrial capabilities in the system on one of the planets. Mining operations on the other planets had come to a slow halt as the easily gathered resources had ran out. The asteroid belt had been mined to gravel, and the gas giants were reduced to wisps of vapor. One the machinery on the surface of the fourth planet had still been active when the endless hordes of the Lanaktallan war machine had pitted themselves against the Mad Lemurs of Terra.

But that was before the Atrekna arrived.

They found only wreckage. The howling isotopes of atomic detonations, irradiated wreckage, the remains of tanks, strikers, and even warmechs.

They had no curiosity. They were all dead things, but could be recovered, scrapped, and used to fuel the Atrekna's war machine.

The Atrekna were unhappy about the fact that they were forced to build war material more than once instead of just copying it over and over, as it was growing more and more difficult to replicate equipment and resources with temporal shifting.

Normally they'd use their vast powers to replace the gas giants and the asteroid belt, restore the resources on the planetoids, then start growing slavespawn and building AWM forces.

The system was a wreck. Deep in the stellar mass was a stellar stabilizer. There was discussion on whether or not to remove it but it was ultimately decided that it would prevent the inheritors of the Mad Lemurs of Terra's wrath from detonating the stellar mass.

Eight times the crazed New Hive and others had done so.

That meant constantly expending power to keep the stellar mass sunk into the subspace foam and keep the stellar mass red and dim to extend its life.

The first order of business was cleaning the planet. A smaller harvester was brought in, the size of a large metropolis. It landed on the planet, half of it sunk into the poisonous and toxic ocean, and began deploying recovery machines.

The Substance W proved worse than useless. It was full of rage, wrath, and hatred. There was quite a bit of it scattered around, so the Atrekna recovered it and dumped it into the stellar mass. Sure, it could survive temperatures and gravitational force that strong, but at least it kept it away from the Atrekna.

To be honest, the Atrekna were growing quite fatigued with that enraged primal scream that the Mad Lemurs of Terra seemed to have taught anyone who met them.

Once the wreckage had been cleared and processed, the Atrekna then began to build as well as use their temporal abilities to shift forward resources that had already been mined out. There was difficultly, and some times a random assortment of objects in the region came forward, but the worst that would happen is Substance W wreckage would be shifted forward with the debris.

The Atrekna worked with silent purpose. The inheritors of the Mad Lemur's rage had learned how to penetrate the normally secure boundary of systems that had been sunk down and were liberating them or outright destroying them.

A few Atrekna were relieved that the Mad Lemurs of Terra were gone, after having faced them on the battlefield. The Young Ones scoffed that the Mad Lemurs of Terra could be so terrible, but the Ancient Ones nodded thoughtfully.

Word had come: The Mad Lemurs of Terra of yesterday would be returning tomorrow to assault today.

The Atrekna set about ensuring that they could hold off any assault by the Mad Lemurs of Terra when they returned.

The great forges aboard the Harvester worked day and night, producing the materials and machinery that the Atrekna needed to fortify the world. Fortresses were built, great factories churned out war material, slavespawn were grown in new configurations.

The Old Ones and Ancient Ones pushed aside the Young Ones, who wanted to continue as the Atrekna always had, and began planning and preparing as if they could no longer use temporal trickery to refresh and reinforce their military forces.

The Young Ones insisted that the temporal shifting had always worked and thus it always would.

The two factions were coldly aloof toward one another.

The Old Ones and the Ancient Ones believed, for different reasons, that the practice of temporal replication was dangerous.

With age, comes wisdom.

The Young Ones intended on moving forward vast resources in an area. It had been one of the areas with the heaviest amount of wreckage and radiation and evidence of atomic weaponry usage, but it also represented one of the most resource intensive areas.

The Ancient Ones watched silently.

The Old Ones counseled against it, warning that the Herd Lords never wasted resources and something had forced them to expend vast resources to destroy the area.

The Young Ones scoffed, gathered together a Conclave, and shifted the area.

The resources arrived, but so did the radiation and wreckage.

And the Substance W, which screamed across all the phasic bands.

The Young Ones fled.

The Ancient Ones commanded the Harvester to mark the area as a priority for reclamation.

The Old Ones counseled caution. Something about it felt dangerous to their senses.

Both the Young Ones and the Ancient Ones scoffed as they turned their attention to calling up long gone biomass on the surface of the poisoned and ruined oceans.

Many of the Old Ones tasted the air.

It had a smell of a sort to their psychic senses.

A kind of... smelly smell.

A smelly smell that smells... smelly.

The Old Ones warned the Ancient Ones and the Young Ones that there was something wrong with the vast area of wreckage, the thousands of square miles now littered with wreckage and radiation. The landscape that gave off a green glow at night and caused an aurora-borealis as the isotopes clashed with the planet's magnetosphere.

The Ancient Ones, veterans of the titanic struggle between the Atrekna and the Herd Lords and the Hive Lords, looked over the area and suggested to the Old Ones that they meditate upon their fears of the Mad Lemurs of Terra.

The Young Ones mocked and derided the Old Ones, who, at one time or another, faced the Mad Lemurs of Terra and their Children of Wrath on the battlefield and escaped with their lives.

The Old Ones silently left.

They had been right.

As the Young Ones and the Ancient Ones brought forward thick beds of algae to use as biomass, rippling veins of metals to use as resources, and vast petroleum seas beneath the bedrock, they ignored the area, waiting for the Harvester to finish with more urgent tasks before clearing the area that had shifted forward with so much worthless Substance W.

In the middle of the area, amid the heaviest wreckage, the area loudest with the howling of isotopes, and ringed with the most craters formed by atomics and antimatter weapons, there was the wreckage of a heavily armored building. It was low to the ground, an angled vault wider than it was tall and three times as long. The sides were ripped open, showing damaged machinery that sparked and dribbled fluids. It was partially melted, even the warsteel damaged from exposure to antimatter.

There were too many fading or still active energy sources from destroyed war material in the area for the Atrekna to worry about the faint energy source in the building. The Young Ones and Ancient Ones both believed that the power sources would be utilized by the Harvester to increase the output of war machines.

So they ignored them all.

And missed the flickering fluttering signature of an unshielded zero point reactor.

Commander Jane Marcus Prastini opened her one working eye, groaning, her face pressed against her keyboard. Her other eye was swollen and sealed shut by dried blood and she could taste blood in her mouth, mixing with saliva to drool onto the keyboard.

Around her sparks showered and lights flickered. Alarms wailed as she blinked her one working eye.

I'm alive, she thought. That damned Lanky didn't get me.

Five times the same Lank drive signature had shown up right after she did.

The first two times she had beaten him and forced him to retreat in the same ship.

The next he had fought her to a bitter draw before withdrawing, afterwards she had taken over the system.

The last two he had beaten her. He'd slammed atomics straight into her face the second she landed.

This one, he had arrived within the hour and obviously taken over command. He'd pushed at her steadily, bombarding her constantly. Eventually overwhelming her point defense and anti-missile systems.

But it looked to Commander Jane Marcus Prastini like the AM bombardment hadn't quite gotten her.

She raised her head and saw she had a single LED monitor still flickering, still working. The colors were smeared by the EM pulse, but it still worked.

Her forces and resources were in shit shape.

No extractors. No reactors. No infantry. No supplementary buildings. No vehicles. No mechs. No resource gatherers.

She had her command center.

She shook her head and reached over to the cooler, pulling out a Bingo Cola and cracking it open. The can autocooled in her hand and she rolled it across the bruised and swollen half of her face, wincing at the can's pressure on what she now realized was a broken cheekbone. She looked at her status monitors, those that still worked, then hit the keys on her damaged keyboard to get her emergency datascreens to come up.

Her templates were scrambled, the cloning banks were fried out, her mass tanks were almost empty, she had a single zero-point reactor that was high heat and because of that it had less than 22% energy output.

But she still had a single creation engine and a single nanoforge still working, even if their slush was above 60% and their heat was at 85%.

They were open to air and cooling rapidly.

She went to do parallel ordering queues and found out that only one of the lobes of her supercomputer systems was still alive and even then the organic supercoolant was all dead and only providing cooling at 14% of normal.

I'm hurt bad, but I've come back from worse, she thought to herself.

No outside sensor systems, no satellites in orbit, no drone feeds, no working communications arrays.

She was blind, deaf, and dumb.

She looked up at the clocks and saw they were all blinking. With two exceptions. Her radiation shielding was shot and she was breathing unfiltered air coming in through massive damage. The other clock warned her that she had an estimated 162 hours before neural functions ceased due to progressive damage from an unknown source.

That last one she had faced on her last two drops.

First thing first, she thought herself. She ordered the nanoforge to start fabbing up replacement parts for her computers. She ordered the creation engine to fab up repair units.

Ninety seconds before the first repair drone is ready, she thought, taking a drink off the Bingo Cola. I've won and lost wars in that time.

The clock slowly ticked by until there was a tone telling her the task was done. The repair unit immediately started work on repairing the supercomputer and she put it on autonomous mode. She ordered up another repair drone and waited the sixty seconds for the overheated systems to produce it.

That one she ordered to fix the radiation shielding, then the coolant systems.

She glanced at the clock.

Elapsed time since reawakening: 175 seconds.

She was surprised the Lanky wasn't pushing his advantage and decided it was because he didn't know she was still alive.

That meant letting him think she was dead was her best option.

She tore off part of her shirt, wincing slightly at the bruised flesh that was exposed, and wet it with the Bingo Cola before slowly wiping her face off. The soda was sticky but it was better than the blood.

The computers went live as the organic supercoolant and the supercomputer lobes and thinking wires were replaced. She ran a status report and groaned.

All she had was a badly damaged command center, a creation engine and nanoforge that had shut down due to heat and slush, a slowly dying reactor, and two repair drones.

I've won with less, she thought. She looked at the damaged plaque on the wall.

CONFEDERATE MILITARY AUTONOMOUS WAR FACILITY

--CREATE, COMMAND, CONQUER--

She ordered the computer to start repairing and error checking her templates, starting with the Tier-1 stuff, then ordered her drones to repair one of the external generators and the cloning bank. She tagged them for max stealth and ordered additional stealth shielding for everything.

You think I'm dead. Let's keep you thinking that.

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The Atrekna Old Ones still present were meditating, shielded by crystalline pillars, obelisks, plinths, and henges. They were performing the psychic equivalent of sniffing around.

Something smelled off.

There was a faint smell in the air. A smelly kind of smell that smelled smelly.