Chapter 575: 575
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"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.
One of them caught a good whiff and alerted the others. They moved up and opened their senses wide to get a good sniff of the smelly smell.
Blood.
Lemur blood.
and rage. Cold, simmering, carefully hidden, but rage all the same.
One of the Old Ones alerted the Young Ones and Ancient Onces.
Those Atrekna did a fast psychic pass over the wreckage and found plenty of echoes of lemur wrath, rage, and blood.
They told the Old Ones that they were reacting to shadows and impressions left upon the Substance W and pushed the Old Ones from the communal mind.
The Old Ones appealed to the half-grown Overmind, which still needed dozens of Atrekna brains added to it, stitched to it with synth-tissue, glued together with artificial neurons.
The Overmind swept over the wreckage.
It tasted of old blood, fading echoes of lemur rage, and madness.
It ejected the Old Ones from the Overmind and went back to contemplating how the system would be used to launch additional attacks on the Herd Lords worlds in what had been the Hive Lord's systems.
The Old Ones narrowed their focus, sharpened their senses, and began to slowly sweep that vast tract of land that was scattered with wreckage and howling isotopes.
---------
Commander Jane Marcus Prastini looked at the clock. Almost an hour had passed.
Her cloning banks were online. She had three types of Born Whole templates repaired and loaded. Her mass tanks were refilled. She had eight constructor drones. Her radiation shielding was repaired.
Best yet, her eye had been replaced by a cybernetic implant and her ripped and torn uniform repaired.
She unwrapped a Goody Yum-Yum Bar and shoved it in her mouth as she popped a stealth drone to get a good look at the map around her.
Battlefield wreckage, some of it sunk into the ground. She frowned and checked closer.
There was one of her oil derricks, but the oil was bubbling and pushing its way to the surface even though she had pumped out all the oil then turned to pumping the chamber full of heavy water as an additional mass tank.
Frowning as she chewed on the kiwi-fruit and strawberry chocolate bar she ordered the drones to check the status of the old wells and resource strippers.
They came back as sitting on full resources.
That was impossible. One of the first things she had done was rip up those lithium salt flats.
Something strange is going on, she realized.
Jane quickly adjusted her building queue from exploration and resource gathering to 70% Defense/20% Resource Gathering/10% Offense. She prioritized air defense and point defense and building concealed structures.
The vehicle construction facility was badly damaged but could be repaired, the same with the aerospace construction facility. She put those on priority with a weighted bias and then examined her drone capabilities.
She had what she needed for counter-grav and graviton systems. She tabbed up a stealth drone, ordered it to go to 150K meters in a counter-orbit, and turned her attention back to building.
Two hundred seventeen minutes.
Jane was still behind, but she worked with what she had.
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The Old Ones carefully scrutinized the area.
Something was there.
Something the Ancient Ones and the Young Ones could not see.
The Ancient Ones were blinded by their victories over the lost extinct Herd Lords and Hive Lords, mistaking the current descendants for the ones they faced. The Young Ones were secure in their knowledge that the Atrekna had never been truly beaten thus they never could.
The Old Ones all knew that neither of the other groups had faced the Mad Lemurs of Terra.
There was something out there.
One stopped. There was a phasic impression. A slight one. Not much, but just enough to feel.
It called over enough of the others to form a Quorum and bring up the impression.
It was of a scarred and battered Herd Lord. One eye and part of its face was replaced by crude cybernetics, it had scars on its flank, it had two crude cybernetic arms. It was holding a pistol and staring out of the impression.
"Use atomics and antimatter cruise missiles now or I will personally shoot the rest of you ignorant cowards in your flank spines!" the image snapped. "You have less than five minutes to destroy that lemur or she will burn this system down around our ears just like she has a half dozen others!"
The image flickered and then repeated.
The Atrekna consulted. The Herd Lord was obviously a warrior, possibly a War Stallion.
Its opponent was a singular female Mad Lemur of Terra, yet the Herd Lord was insisting on using antimatter and atomic weaponry on the planet's surface. A lemur of such power that she had destroyed entire systems.
The Atrekna Old Ones slowly began to comb through the wreckage where the antimatter and atomic charges had gone off the thickest.
---------
Jane cursed as her optical sensors spotted it.
The faint hazy flicker of an Atrekna astral scout.
She depowered everything but the creation engines and nanoforges in her heavily shielded command center, then watched the astral scout drift around.
You're looking for me, aren't you, squidward? she thought. I'll bet that Lanky Smacky is long gone or long dead. So why am I back? Time jittering problems?
She shrugged as she stuffed the last of the Countess Crey Strawberry-Rasberry Fruit Pie in her mouth, then licked the gooey filling off her fingers as she watched it drift by. She used one finger, licked clean of course -she wasn't a total slob- to tab up phasic shielding and weapons as well as temporal warfare systems.
At least I'm not geared up for a zerg rush only to find out my opponent is a cruiser spammer, she thought. She shook her head. I hope these gross weirdos didn't destroy you, Smacky.
---------
The Atrekna moved slowly, crossing the battlefield again.
There was something here.
They knew it.
----------
Jane knew her time had almost ran out.
She was six hours in. Her skin was starting to itch from radiation exposure.
Welp, let's start this dance, she thought to herself.
She activated the warplan she had punched in hours ago.
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The Old Ones sensed it just before it all came apart.
The sudden savage glee that radiated out from a hundred hidden pylons that completely masked where the originator was located. It clawed and raked at the Old Ones, who sped back to their bodies along their shining silver astral cords.
The Young Ones and the Ancient Ones froze as the bestial roar of enraged hatred cascaded across their senses.
The Old Ones fled, having prepared the way prior.
After all, when facing the Mad Lemurs of Terra or their Children of Wrath, it was always best to prepare your exit.
They were gone before the missile launches started, before the strikers broke free of the rubble they were hiding in, before the tanks activated their battlescreens and obliterated the debris and scrap that hid them.
The Harvester goggled in shock as nearly two hundred cruise missiles came in at Mach-Eight, flying less than ten meters off the ground, spreading out in clumps with jamming and decoys spawning across the Harvester's electronic vision.
The Ancient Ones and Young Ones felt themselves slammed against the metaphysical ground as the temporal systems went online. Temporal disruptor charges blew off, followed by temporal dissonance charges, and ending with temporal stabilizers at full power when the rippling tearing surging tides of temporal energy ebbed.
The phasic scramblers and stobers hit them next even as aerospace fighters clawed for the sky, leaving behind white streaks as they made Mach-Three less than a half mile from their launch point. Their weapon pods were hot, their bomb bays loaded, as the stealth fighters raced for the targets that Jane had tagged after her stealth satellites had revealed them. Massive doors slowly creaked open and a cruiser flanked by four destroyers lifted up on counter-grav, making for orbit, their heavy battlescreens coming to life.
The Young Ones and the Ancient Ones found themselves in the fight for their life, even the Harvester on the defensive, even the Overmind under attack, as the area they had brought forward that had contained nothing but wreckage seemed to spawn entire hordes of combat craft.
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In her command center, Commander Jane Marcus Prastini bared bloody teeth as she reached out for another drink, this one a Liquid Hate.
She had less than a hundred and twenty hours left on her clock. She would be dead soon after her time ran out.
But she'd ripped the guts out of systems in less time than that.
She had no idea if the Confederacy still existed.
She had no idea if any other humans existed.
She did know that the Atrekna were there.
And the Atrekna was the enemy.
Her grin got wider even as she held back a cough.
The enemy only existed to be destroyed.
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There was a streaking sparkle that ended with a purple flash out by the Oort Cloud. The ship revealed was strange, unpleasing to the eye. A twisted and repugnant melding of tissue and flesh that pulsated with strange life. It vomited up a volley of probes and then vanished into a hole before pulling a cloth over the top of the hole to conceal the hole's existence.
The probes spread out, scanning the system. They did not transmit their discoveries, but rather returned to their creator, which devoured them whole.
Dalvanak stared at the screens and the data.
Confederate battle cruisers, destroyers, and frigates drifted around razed and barren planets, their drives dead, their hulls inert masses of Substance W, which the lemurs called 'warsteel.'
The worlds were a loss. Giant mechs were frozen in position, tanks were halted in place, and aerospace fighters and strikers had crashed to the ground. Gun emplacements were frozen up and dead. Slavespawn and AWM were crushed, burned, shattered, and broken.
The lemurs had been there. It was a more thorough destruction than the lemur's allies preferred.
Dalvanak knew the lemurs had been here.
The rogue Atrekna had seen enough. The system was dead. Stellar and temporal stabilizers deep within the stellar masses plasma seas ensured the system was of no use to the Atrekna.
It was lost.
Dalvanak ordered his ship to jump to the upper bands of the atomic hyperplane.
With a streak, he was gone.
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The skeleton, still clad in the rags of its uniform, sat in the command chair within the damaged and rent command center. It still held a can of Bingo Cola in one skeletal hand as its grinning visage stared at the sole working screen.
The LED screen was warped, its colors were off, and there were dead pixels across it.
A pair of words slowly blinked on the screen.
SYSTEM STANDBY
Please report us if you find any errors so we can fix it asap!
"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.
--------
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.
One of them caught a good whiff and alerted the others. They moved up and opened their senses wide to get a good sniff of the smelly smell.
Blood.
Lemur blood.
and rage. Cold, simmering, carefully hidden, but rage all the same.
One of the Old Ones alerted the Young Ones and Ancient Onces.
Those Atrekna did a fast psychic pass over the wreckage and found plenty of echoes of lemur wrath, rage, and blood.
They told the Old Ones that they were reacting to shadows and impressions left upon the Substance W and pushed the Old Ones from the communal mind.
The Old Ones appealed to the half-grown Overmind, which still needed dozens of Atrekna brains added to it, stitched to it with synth-tissue, glued together with artificial neurons.
The Overmind swept over the wreckage.
It tasted of old blood, fading echoes of lemur rage, and madness.
It ejected the Old Ones from the Overmind and went back to contemplating how the system would be used to launch additional attacks on the Herd Lords worlds in what had been the Hive Lord's systems.
The Old Ones narrowed their focus, sharpened their senses, and began to slowly sweep that vast tract of land that was scattered with wreckage and howling isotopes.
---------
Commander Jane Marcus Prastini looked at the clock. Almost an hour had passed.
Her cloning banks were online. She had three types of Born Whole templates repaired and loaded. Her mass tanks were refilled. She had eight constructor drones. Her radiation shielding was repaired.
Best yet, her eye had been replaced by a cybernetic implant and her ripped and torn uniform repaired.
She unwrapped a Goody Yum-Yum Bar and shoved it in her mouth as she popped a stealth drone to get a good look at the map around her.
Battlefield wreckage, some of it sunk into the ground. She frowned and checked closer.
There was one of her oil derricks, but the oil was bubbling and pushing its way to the surface even though she had pumped out all the oil then turned to pumping the chamber full of heavy water as an additional mass tank.
Frowning as she chewed on the kiwi-fruit and strawberry chocolate bar she ordered the drones to check the status of the old wells and resource strippers.
They came back as sitting on full resources.
That was impossible. One of the first things she had done was rip up those lithium salt flats.
Something strange is going on, she realized.
Jane quickly adjusted her building queue from exploration and resource gathering to 70% Defense/20% Resource Gathering/10% Offense. She prioritized air defense and point defense and building concealed structures.
The vehicle construction facility was badly damaged but could be repaired, the same with the aerospace construction facility. She put those on priority with a weighted bias and then examined her drone capabilities.
She had what she needed for counter-grav and graviton systems. She tabbed up a stealth drone, ordered it to go to 150K meters in a counter-orbit, and turned her attention back to building.
Two hundred seventeen minutes.
Jane was still behind, but she worked with what she had.
-------------
The Old Ones carefully scrutinized the area.
Something was there.
Something the Ancient Ones and the Young Ones could not see.
The Ancient Ones were blinded by their victories over the lost extinct Herd Lords and Hive Lords, mistaking the current descendants for the ones they faced. The Young Ones were secure in their knowledge that the Atrekna had never been truly beaten thus they never could.
The Old Ones all knew that neither of the other groups had faced the Mad Lemurs of Terra.
There was something out there.
One stopped. There was a phasic impression. A slight one. Not much, but just enough to feel.
It called over enough of the others to form a Quorum and bring up the impression.
It was of a scarred and battered Herd Lord. One eye and part of its face was replaced by crude cybernetics, it had scars on its flank, it had two crude cybernetic arms. It was holding a pistol and staring out of the impression.
"Use atomics and antimatter cruise missiles now or I will personally shoot the rest of you ignorant cowards in your flank spines!" the image snapped. "You have less than five minutes to destroy that lemur or she will burn this system down around our ears just like she has a half dozen others!"
The image flickered and then repeated.
The Atrekna consulted. The Herd Lord was obviously a warrior, possibly a War Stallion.
Its opponent was a singular female Mad Lemur of Terra, yet the Herd Lord was insisting on using antimatter and atomic weaponry on the planet's surface. A lemur of such power that she had destroyed entire systems.
The Atrekna Old Ones slowly began to comb through the wreckage where the antimatter and atomic charges had gone off the thickest.
---------
Jane cursed as her optical sensors spotted it.
The faint hazy flicker of an Atrekna astral scout.
She depowered everything but the creation engines and nanoforges in her heavily shielded command center, then watched the astral scout drift around.
You're looking for me, aren't you, squidward? she thought. I'll bet that Lanky Smacky is long gone or long dead. So why am I back? Time jittering problems?
She shrugged as she stuffed the last of the Countess Crey Strawberry-Rasberry Fruit Pie in her mouth, then licked the gooey filling off her fingers as she watched it drift by. She used one finger, licked clean of course -she wasn't a total slob- to tab up phasic shielding and weapons as well as temporal warfare systems.
At least I'm not geared up for a zerg rush only to find out my opponent is a cruiser spammer, she thought. She shook her head. I hope these gross weirdos didn't destroy you, Smacky.
---------
The Atrekna moved slowly, crossing the battlefield again.
There was something here.
They knew it.
----------
Jane knew her time had almost ran out.
She was six hours in. Her skin was starting to itch from radiation exposure.
Welp, let's start this dance, she thought to herself.
She activated the warplan she had punched in hours ago.
-------------
The Old Ones sensed it just before it all came apart.
The sudden savage glee that radiated out from a hundred hidden pylons that completely masked where the originator was located. It clawed and raked at the Old Ones, who sped back to their bodies along their shining silver astral cords.
The Young Ones and the Ancient Ones froze as the bestial roar of enraged hatred cascaded across their senses.
The Old Ones fled, having prepared the way prior.
After all, when facing the Mad Lemurs of Terra or their Children of Wrath, it was always best to prepare your exit.
They were gone before the missile launches started, before the strikers broke free of the rubble they were hiding in, before the tanks activated their battlescreens and obliterated the debris and scrap that hid them.
The Harvester goggled in shock as nearly two hundred cruise missiles came in at Mach-Eight, flying less than ten meters off the ground, spreading out in clumps with jamming and decoys spawning across the Harvester's electronic vision.
The Ancient Ones and Young Ones felt themselves slammed against the metaphysical ground as the temporal systems went online. Temporal disruptor charges blew off, followed by temporal dissonance charges, and ending with temporal stabilizers at full power when the rippling tearing surging tides of temporal energy ebbed.
The phasic scramblers and stobers hit them next even as aerospace fighters clawed for the sky, leaving behind white streaks as they made Mach-Three less than a half mile from their launch point. Their weapon pods were hot, their bomb bays loaded, as the stealth fighters raced for the targets that Jane had tagged after her stealth satellites had revealed them. Massive doors slowly creaked open and a cruiser flanked by four destroyers lifted up on counter-grav, making for orbit, their heavy battlescreens coming to life.
The Young Ones and the Ancient Ones found themselves in the fight for their life, even the Harvester on the defensive, even the Overmind under attack, as the area they had brought forward that had contained nothing but wreckage seemed to spawn entire hordes of combat craft.
---------
In her command center, Commander Jane Marcus Prastini bared bloody teeth as she reached out for another drink, this one a Liquid Hate.
She had less than a hundred and twenty hours left on her clock. She would be dead soon after her time ran out.
But she'd ripped the guts out of systems in less time than that.
She had no idea if the Confederacy still existed.
She had no idea if any other humans existed.
She did know that the Atrekna were there.
And the Atrekna was the enemy.
Her grin got wider even as she held back a cough.
The enemy only existed to be destroyed.
----------
There was a streaking sparkle that ended with a purple flash out by the Oort Cloud. The ship revealed was strange, unpleasing to the eye. A twisted and repugnant melding of tissue and flesh that pulsated with strange life. It vomited up a volley of probes and then vanished into a hole before pulling a cloth over the top of the hole to conceal the hole's existence.
The probes spread out, scanning the system. They did not transmit their discoveries, but rather returned to their creator, which devoured them whole.
Dalvanak stared at the screens and the data.
Confederate battle cruisers, destroyers, and frigates drifted around razed and barren planets, their drives dead, their hulls inert masses of Substance W, which the lemurs called 'warsteel.'
The worlds were a loss. Giant mechs were frozen in position, tanks were halted in place, and aerospace fighters and strikers had crashed to the ground. Gun emplacements were frozen up and dead. Slavespawn and AWM were crushed, burned, shattered, and broken.
The lemurs had been there. It was a more thorough destruction than the lemur's allies preferred.
Dalvanak knew the lemurs had been here.
The rogue Atrekna had seen enough. The system was dead. Stellar and temporal stabilizers deep within the stellar masses plasma seas ensured the system was of no use to the Atrekna.
It was lost.
Dalvanak ordered his ship to jump to the upper bands of the atomic hyperplane.
With a streak, he was gone.
------------
The skeleton, still clad in the rags of its uniform, sat in the command chair within the damaged and rent command center. It still held a can of Bingo Cola in one skeletal hand as its grinning visage stared at the sole working screen.
The LED screen was warped, its colors were off, and there were dead pixels across it.
A pair of words slowly blinked on the screen.
SYSTEM STANDBY
"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 HasslehoffThe 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.--------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.One of them caught a good whiff and alerted the others. They moved up and opened their senses wide to get a good sniff of the smelly smell.Blood.Lemur blood.and rage. Cold, simmering, carefully hidden, but rage all the same.One of the Old Ones alerted the Young Ones and Ancient Onces.Those Atrekna did a fast psychic pass over the wreckage and found plenty of echoes of lemur wrath, rage, and blood.They told the Old Ones that they were reacting to shadows and impressions left upon the Substance W and pushed the Old Ones from the communal mind.The Old Ones appealed to the half-grown Overmind, which still needed dozens of Atrekna brains added to it, stitched to it with synth-tissue, glued together with artificial neurons.The Overmind swept over the wreckage.It tasted of old blood, fading echoes of lemur rage, and madness.It ejected the Old Ones from the Overmind and went back to contemplating how the system would be used to launch additional attacks on the Herd Lords worlds in what had been the Hive Lord's systems.The Old Ones narrowed their focus, sharpened their senses, and began to slowly sweep that vast tract of land that was scattered with wreckage and howling isotopes.---------Commander Jane Marcus Prastini looked at the clock. Almost an hour had passed.Her cloning banks were online. She had three types of Born Whole templates repaired and loaded. Her mass tanks were refilled. She had eight constructor drones. Her radiation shielding was repaired.Best yet, her eye had been replaced by a cybernetic implant and her ripped and torn uniform repaired.She unwrapped a Goody Yum-Yum Bar and shoved it in her mouth as she popped a stealth drone to get a good look at the map around her.Battlefield wreckage, some of it sunk into the ground. She frowned and checked closer.There was one of her oil derricks, but the oil was bubbling and pushing its way to the surface even though she had pumped out all the oil then turned to pumping the chamber full of heavy water as an additional mass tank.Frowning as she chewed on the kiwi-fruit and strawberry chocolate bar she ordered the drones to check the status of the old wells and resource strippers.They came back as sitting on full resources.That was impossible. One of the first things she had done was rip up those lithium salt flats.Something strange is going on, she realized.Jane quickly adjusted her building queue from exploration and resource gathering to 70% Defense/20% Resource Gathering/10% Offense. She prioritized air defense and point defense and building concealed structures.The vehicle construction facility was badly damaged but could be repaired, the same with the aerospace construction facility. She put those on priority with a weighted bias and then examined her drone capabilities.She had what she needed for counter-grav and graviton systems. She tabbed up a stealth drone, ordered it to go to 150K meters in a counter-orbit, and turned her attention back to building.Two hundred seventeen minutes.Jane was still behind, but she worked with what she had.-------------The Old Ones carefully scrutinized the area.Something was there.Something the Ancient Ones and the Young Ones could not see.The Ancient Ones were blinded by their victories over the lost extinct Herd Lords and Hive Lords, mistaking the current descendants for the ones they faced. The Young Ones were secure in their knowledge that the Atrekna had never been truly beaten thus they never could.The Old Ones all knew that neither of the other groups had faced the Mad Lemurs of Terra.There was something out there.One stopped. There was a phasic impression. A slight one. Not much, but just enough to feel.It called over enough of the others to form a Quorum and bring up the impression.It was of a scarred and battered Herd Lord. One eye and part of its face was replaced by crude cybernetics, it had scars on its flank, it had two crude cybernetic arms. It was holding a pistol and staring out of the impression."Use atomics and antimatter cruise missiles now or I will personally shoot the rest of you ignorant cowards in your flank spines!" the image snapped. "You have less than five minutes to destroy that lemur or she will burn this system down around our ears just like she has a half dozen others!"The image flickered and then repeated.The Atrekna consulted. The Herd Lord was obviously a warrior, possibly a War Stallion.Its opponent was a singular female Mad Lemur of Terra, yet the Herd Lord was insisting on using antimatter and atomic weaponry on the planet's surface. A lemur of such power that she had destroyed entire systems.The Atrekna Old Ones slowly began to comb through the wreckage where the antimatter and atomic charges had gone off the thickest.---------Jane cursed as her optical sensors spotted it.The faint hazy flicker of an Atrekna astral scout.She depowered everything but the creation engines and nanoforges in her heavily shielded command center, then watched the astral scout drift around.You're looking for me, aren't you, squidward? she thought. I'll bet that Lanky Smacky is long gone or long dead. So why am I back? Time jittering problems?She shrugged as she stuffed the last of the Countess Crey Strawberry-Rasberry Fruit Pie in her mouth, then licked the gooey filling off her fingers as she watched it drift by. She used one finger, licked clean of course -she wasn't a total slob- to tab up phasic shielding and weapons as well as temporal warfare systems.At least I'm not geared up for a zerg rush only to find out my opponent is a cruiser spammer, she thought. She shook her head. I hope these gross weirdos didn't destroy you, Smacky.---------The Atrekna moved slowly, crossing the battlefield again.There was something here.They knew it.----------Jane knew her time had almost ran out.She was six hours in. Her skin was starting to itch from radiation exposure.Welp, let's start this dance, she thought to herself.She activated the warplan she had punched in hours ago.-------------The Old Ones sensed it just before it all came apart.The sudden savage glee that radiated out from a hundred hidden pylons that completely masked where the originator was located. It clawed and raked at the Old Ones, who sped back to their bodies along their shining silver astral cords.The Young Ones and the Ancient Ones froze as the bestial roar of enraged hatred cascaded across their senses.The Old Ones fled, having prepared the way prior.After all, when facing the Mad Lemurs of Terra or their Children of Wrath, it was always best to prepare your exit.They were gone before the missile launches started, before the strikers broke free of the rubble they were hiding in, before the tanks activated their battlescreens and obliterated the debris and scrap that hid them.The Harvester goggled in shock as nearly two hundred cruise missiles came in at Mach-Eight, flying less than ten meters off the ground, spreading out in clumps with jamming and decoys spawning across the Harvester's electronic vision.The Ancient Ones and Young Ones felt themselves slammed against the metaphysical ground as the temporal systems went online. Temporal disruptor charges blew off, followed by temporal dissonance charges, and ending with temporal stabilizers at full power when the rippling tearing surging tides of temporal energy ebbed.The phasic scramblers and stobers hit them next even as aerospace fighters clawed for the sky, leaving behind white streaks as they made Mach-Three less than a half mile from their launch point. Their weapon pods were hot, their bomb bays loaded, as the stealth fighters raced for the targets that Jane had tagged after her stealth satellites had revealed them. Massive doors slowly creaked open and a cruiser flanked by four destroyers lifted up on counter-grav, making for orbit, their heavy battlescreens coming to life.The Young Ones and the Ancient Ones found themselves in the fight for their life, even the Harvester on the defensive, even the Overmind under attack, as the area they had brought forward that had contained nothing but wreckage seemed to spawn entire hordes of combat craft.---------In her command center, Commander Jane Marcus Prastini bared bloody teeth as she reached out for another drink, this one a Liquid Hate.She had less than a hundred and twenty hours left on her clock. She would be dead soon after her time ran out.But she'd ripped the guts out of systems in less time than that.She had no idea if the Confederacy still existed.She had no idea if any other humans existed.She did know that the Atrekna were there.And the Atrekna was the enemy.Her grin got wider even as she held back a cough.The enemy only existed to be destroyed.----------There was a streaking sparkle that ended with a purple flash out by the Oort Cloud. The ship revealed was strange, unpleasing to the eye. A twisted and repugnant melding of tissue and flesh that pulsated with strange life. It vomited up a volley of probes and then vanished into a hole before pulling a cloth over the top of the hole to conceal the hole's existence.The probes spread out, scanning the system. They did not transmit their discoveries, but rather returned to their creator, which devoured them whole.Dalvanak stared at the screens and the data.Confederate battle cruisers, destroyers, and frigates drifted around razed and barren planets, their drives dead, their hulls inert masses of Substance W, which the lemurs called 'warsteel.'The worlds were a loss. Giant mechs were frozen in position, tanks were halted in place, and aerospace fighters and strikers had crashed to the ground. Gun emplacements were frozen up and dead. Slavespawn and AWM were crushed, burned, shattered, and broken.The lemurs had been there. It was a more thorough destruction than the lemur's allies preferred.Dalvanak knew the lemurs had been here.The rogue Atrekna had seen enough. The system was dead. Stellar and temporal stabilizers deep within the stellar masses plasma seas ensured the system was of no use to the Atrekna.It was lost.Dalvanak ordered his ship to jump to the upper bands of the atomic hyperplane.With a streak, he was gone.------------The skeleton, still clad in the rags of its uniform, sat in the command chair within the damaged and rent command center. It still held a can of Bingo Cola in one skeletal hand as its grinning visage stared at the sole working screen.The LED screen was warped, its colors were off, and there were dead pixels across it.A pair of words slowly blinked on the screen.SYSTEM STANDBY
