Chapter 589: Stock Car Race (1/2)

”For those of you raised under the iron fist of the Executor Council and the Unified Council's laws, the Confederacy's insistence of ”Innocent Until Proven Guilty”, with the burden of proof relying on the prosecution and State rather than upon the accused, with the burden of proof being 'beyond a reasonable doubt' and sometimes 'overwhelming', is a horrible shock.

”The Terran Confederacy believes it is better to let a hundred guilty beings go free than punish a single innocent being.

”Which is why it took me so long to understand exactly what was being prosecuted during the history Trial of General Trucker.” - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

The station drifted around the dark neutron star, a strange and twisted thing of bioengineered structure and mechanical engineering. Extruded resin melded with welded battlesteel meshed with throbbing organs pulsating with unnatural life that were joined with strange and esoteric machinery in such a way that it gave both a dark and disturbing life.

Docked to the station was a twisted living ship, a great scar upon its hull where a Confederate Naval C+ cannon had been merged with the ship, twisted engines that could move through time, dimensions, jumpspace, hyperspace, stringspace, and despite the danger, hellspace.

Inside the strange and twisted station was a single Atrekna, his needs and desires seen to by carefully grown servitors instilled with dark life and purpose by the Atrekna researcher.

Formerly the researcher, who had taken to thinking of itself as a 'him', had investigated the relatively simple discipline of temporal mechanics.

But that was in the Old Universe, which was gone, destroyed by the Mad Lemurs of Terra.

Now, temporal mechanics was a demanding and difficult discipline, each discovery, each breakthrough, leading to greater danger and stranger questions.

But the Atrekna, who had labeled itself Dalvanak despite the fact that Atrekna identified one another by psychic auras rather than anything so crass as audible speech, found the increased difficulty, the danger, the questions, and the hard work to be strangely satisfying in a way he had never experienced.

Unlike his fellow Atrekna, Dalvanak scavenged lemur wreckage when he could. Carefully gathering it up like a junkie sidling up to a dealer they aren't sure is a cop. Each item, each treasure, he carefully examined in his lab deep in the gravity well of the neutron star where time itself warped and twisted.

Dalvanak found it useful, despite the occasional screams of wrath, hatred, and agony from the magnetic field of the neutron star that had once held a complete biosphere of steadily growing slavespawn.

It had taken Dalvanak the equivalent of decades to break the secrets of how the Mad Lemurs created their molecular circuitry of such compact design that they used stretched electrons as 'wires' within their circuitry.

It had taken him centuries to understand Mad Lemur programming languages.

Personally, Dalvanak was pleased with his cleverness.

Where his peers and rivals would have tried to take a Mad Lemur prisoner to learn, or attempted to learn it from blasted and damaged wreckage, Dalvanak had approached it much differently.

He had maintained careful concealment and stealthily snuck onto a planet that had once been inhabited by the Mad Lemurs but was now full of the walking dead and Enraged Maddened Angry Lemurs. He had covertly infiltrated a former urban area, researched and stealthily approached and entered a repository of treasure.

After rifling through the pockets of the dead to find their credsticks and credit cards.

Once inside the Space-Mart he moved through the dark aisles carefully, selecting each treasure with utmost care and caution. He then approached the animatronic sales device, quickly purchasing everything he needed.

He did not make haste leaving, he did not want to attract the attention of the always hungry walking dead.

Once he had reached his dark and terrible research station he had carefully examined the strange tomes and the crude hieroglyphics of the Mad Lemur writing.

He read each instruction manual carefully.

Once he had accomplished that, he had logged into the interstellar information network using his carefully acquired hardware that he had spirited away from SpaceMart without paying tarriffs. A fantastic accomplishment in his own eyes.

He had downloaded, in its entirety, each 'distance learning course', rubbing his hands over the steady increase of his knowledge.

He learned each programming language, learned how to create amazing devices with the ”1001 Science Experiments” portable laboratory he had spirited away.

Twice he had carefully infiltrated the same planet, each time rifling through the pockets of corpses for more credsticks and credit cards. He discovered, using the terrible Mad Lemur pistol, that he could disable a Hungry Deceased Lemur, then suck out its thoughts with psychic ability as long as he resisted the urge to consume its cerebral tissue.

He did find carrying around the severed hand of a Mad Lemur distasteful, even if he could use his psychic powers to fool the life sensors, but he did so anyway in order to access bank accounts.

Automatic Teller Machines near the banking institutions were a boon to Dalvanak, although he was always careful to make sure the Hungry Deceased Lemurs were nowhere near as he drained dead lemur's accounts to put on credsticks.

Then he would choose a repository of treasures and loot it.

Once his hold was full of stealthily acquired treasure he would race back, plunging deep into the gravity band, to the bubble his personal research station floated in. He would then shift time, so it passed faster inside the bubble than in the rest of the universe. He would study, learn, wrest the secrets of the lemurs from their artifacts and crudely written documents.

He often watched three dimensional holograms that had been encoded on crystal wafers, watching the daily lives and adventures of the Mad Lemurs of Terra. It had been difficult for Dalvanak to determine how the crystals were deciphered until he had seen an establishment with wafer display machines in the window.

He had looked around quickly, seen none of the Hungry Hungry Lemurs, ran inside the building, grabbed three boxes of the wafer display machines, and rushed out of the building even as the automatron gibbered and shrieked at him to come back and provide financial renumeration for his taking possession of the devices.

He had hurried back to his station, carefully consulted the instruction manuals, and realized he had to make another trip. This time to acquire a display unit. Again, he rushed out, yelling out ”SO LONG, FUCK-O!” as he left the establishment and ran down the street yelling ”WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!” A tactic he had learned confused the automated defenses of the necropolis.

Once it was working, he sunk his laboratory into the time stream to allow time to run faster inside his research station than the universe outside.

The New Universe didn't seem to mind that so much, as long as when he left he changed the charge state of the station so that time went by slower in the station.

Dalvanak had discovered that the New Universe demanded that each action have an equal and opposite reaction in all things.

Dalvanak felt quite accomplished that no being knew that he, Dalvanak el Tentáculo se Enfrentó as he had taken to calling himself, was not really a one of the Mad Lemurs, even though he had made the Dean's List and the top ranking of the grading system for ReFry GalNet Online University.

Such information was to be had.

He always kept up his experimentation, to learn the rules, learn the mechanics, behind the New Universe.

As such, the sudden excitement of the chronotrons he was watching caught his immediate attention.

Dalvanak had been examining the outcome of temporal adjustment upon something called an 'texarkana fire ant farm' and how adjusting the temporal particles and temporal structures quickly caused the worst possible outcome for those who had initially benefited, attempting to learn if there was any way around such a stricture.