First Contact

Chapter 572: Interlude

Chapter 572: Interlude

Sleemas had been a ship captain in the early days of the discovery of the Mad Lemurs of Terra, was on record as being one of the first to encounter one face to face. Since then he had seen the Precursor Autonomous War Machines attack Council Space, the Mad Lemurs of Terra defend those worlds, the Unified Council foolishly go to war with the lemurs, the surrender of the Unified Council, and the appearance of the Atrekna.

For a Shavashan, it was an unholy exciting time.

Sleemas did have to admit, he enjoyed some of the technological advancements.

But those same technological advancement are what put him in the situation he was in.

Thanks to Confederate engineering, automatic systems, and technology, Sleemas was able to command a vessel all on his own, with only limited virtual intelligences to assist him. The engines of his ship were powerful and capable of long distance travel, and the weaponry he'd been able to purchase meant his little one-being starflitter was more heavily armed than a Corporate Military Fleet destroyer.

Which is why he had agreed to accompany a luxury transport full of children who wished to visit a largely uninhabited planet for their final year field trip.

Everything had been fine during the jumpspace travel. Lemur beacons made sure that Sleemas could keep track of the luxury vessel even in jumpspace and adjust his speed to make sure that he would come out of jumpspace a little over an hour before the students did.

Something he was glad he had decided upon for the teenage Shavashan's sake.

Not that it helped him.

Within seconds of dropping into the system he was being scanned. In under a minute he was locked up by targeting systems and he saw massive Precursor Autonomous War Machines lighting their drives and orienting on him.

His LVI's have all screeched with joy, their images going from a cool soothing green to a burning hateful amber as they jumped up and down and pointed at the dozen PAWM heading toward him.

Sleemas made his decision in seconds.

There were 1,474 students, 156 teachers, 38 ship's crew, and 12 security personnel still coming.

Sleemas knew what he had to do.

He laid down in his command couch and ordered it to close. The lid slammed down, the cushions inflated to hold him securely, and the plug slammed into the socket at the base of his skull. For a second there was a slight bit of pain, a tingling burning that swept over his body.

He paid it no mind as he suddenly was the ship. He was surrounded by barking howling little creatures, all pointing at the PAWM.

Sleemas ordered the four barrel nCV cannon to go hot, fired up the missile banks, and launched two mass gatherer torpedoes at a nearby gas giant that was only 6 light seconds away. The torpedoes streaked into hyperspace and emerged less than a second later, dropping into the atmosphere and bringing their systems online.

At the two second mark supercooled gasses compressed and cooled to a slurry flooded into his mass tanks. The missile bay covers retracted and the warbois began waking up, screaming in rage as their slumber was disturbed. His EW warfare systems went live and he could feel the spikes and spines raise up on his 'body' as the electronic warfare systems screeched at the PAWM.

They weren't Harvesters, but they were still the size of small cities and nearly a mile thick.

They were running ranging computations on him as he slid forward through the system.

He set the count-down to when the students would arrive and ordered his computers to churn the astrogation data for the student transport to jump back into jumpspace as soon as their core held enough charge. He identified the nearest military base, only eighty light years away and ordered his astrogation systems to focus on that, dropped a stealth beacon with orders not to reveal itself to anything but the student vessel. He launched another stealth torpedo that had orders not to jump to hyperspace and make for the military base until it coasted into the Oort Cloud.

Ten seconds had elapsed.

His drives were still lit as he pushed further into the system. He knew that the PAWM would follow.

He knew they would.

He wanted them too.

He spun up his battlescreen projectors when his EW system's warboi jumped up and down and screeched that the PAWM had a lock on him. He fired off the flares and strobes and static bombs as he slammed the acceleration to max. He could hear the oversized inertial compensator kick in as his speed jumped from 0.002C to 0.45C in less than a second. He knew his drive signature would burn right through the jamming, but Sleemas had only thrown Tier-5 out, saving the others for later.

He didn't have Confed Space Force gear, but his gear far outstripped anything the Unified Council or the PAWM had.

The PAWM pushed their drives, trying to catch up.

System scans were coming back. The stellar mass was red, engorged, huge to Sleemas's vision. The two habitable planets were coming back with confusing readings, as if they were in two places at once. PAWM were lighting off their drives further in system as the early warning system announced Sleemas's little craft.

His combat gestalt, loaded with eVI's, threw an image to him. It was of one of the fierce Terran carnivores standing in the snow. Arrows stuck out of it and it was bleeding from a multitude of wounds. Blood was drooling from its fierce tooth filled maw, its eyes were bloodshot and red. The text was simple.

I can't win but I can still not lose

Sleemas clenched his teeth as purpose filled him.

Thirty second had elapsed.

One of the moons of the closest gas giant was nothing more than a factory producing PAWM units and Sleemas targeted it by eye, using passive reticles, not bothering with his more advanced and esoteric targeting systems.

His thumb flicked up the cover on the top of the grip he held tight in one fist. His brain ordered the breeches loaded and the magazine prepped. He pressed the button, holding it down.

The light nCV cannon thudded, paused, thudded, paused, as he fired four spaced shots, the whole superstructure of his single-being space-flitter shuddered.

Sleemas heeled over, pulling a shallow arc, spilling em chaff and 'smokers' while fluttering the engines to make it seem like his systems were overstressed as he came about on a new heading, pushing himself in-system.

The four shots hit the small moon square, each moving at 0.75C. The moon shuddered and rang like a bell on each shots, ejecta pluming hundreds of miles into space, much of it moving fast enough to achieve escape velocity.

Cracks appeared on the surface as the entire moon warped and shuddered from the impacts. It held together, but everything on the surface was turned to wreckage by the violent earthquakes as the moon spasmed from the high velocity hits.

The PAWM following Sleemas increased their speed, pushing their engines to 120% of maximum safe thrust. Other PAWM lit their engines and began rising out of ammonia seas and methane clouds.

Oh, you all want me bad now, Sleemas thought to himself. He closed both of his eyelids over his eyes and willed himself to relax. Enraged Phillip be with me now, he thought to himself, remembering his meeting with the legendary Terran. Let me show the courage you showed when you came to my aid.

Sixty seconds.

The PAWM were activating and lighting up their drives across the system. Sleemas could feel them through the neural linkage with his ship. Creatures, bioweapons known as Dwellerspawn, were lifting from the gas giants or uncurling from where they had been sleeping in their orbit around the huge red giant.

Sleemas fired stealth torpedoes and ordered his nanoforges to wet-print up more. He wasn't worried about his mass tanks, the stealth platforms sunk into the gas giants were refilling his mass-tanks as fast as he was depleting them.

He drove inward, angling toward other planetoids that his sensors said were uninhabited but full of energy signatures consistent with PAWM construction. He fired his cannon, four shots at a time, and ordered the nanoforge to wetprint the replacement rounds.

His tiny little morale gestalt tossed up a cartoon of a fat yellow lemur with a club yelling "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING? I'LL TOUCH ANYTHING I WANT!" and smashing the plants, insects, and small creatures around him.

Sleemas felt his spirits lift slightly at that.

Five minutes.

He was keeping ahead of the PAWM, ahead of the Dwellerspawn, emptying his four-barrel nCV cannon every chance he had, throwing out shoals of jammers, firing off decoys, and piloting wildly.

He was deep into the system, a fifth of the distance from the resonance zone toward the stellar mass. His acceleration was up to 0.79C, the closest nCV barrage had been nearly a million miles off, and none of the light speed weapons had gotten close to him.

Ten minutes.

A third of the way into the system.

It looked like everything in the system was converging on him.

Several ships of unknown configuration were lifting off from one of the inhabited planets that his probes had done high-speed flybys of. They looked like vast spiral shelled sea creatures, with a spongy 'foot' extended out, surrounded by graviton producing glowing flagella.

Sleemas changed course, heading downward from the stellar mass and across.

Everything changed course, following him. The creatures and machines were tightening the net, narrowing the geometry, closing the distance.

Fifteen minutes.

He was racing now, shooting for a gap between the Dwellerspawn and the PAWM. Two of the twisted shell craft were orienting on him, great 'wings' of unfolded tissue extended from either side glowing with phasic energy as they absorbed the light of the dying star that should have been a high energy yellow star.

His ship started shuddering as he took near hits and he cranked his battlescreen up to 50%, threw flares and chaff, popped two decoys out to the side, and slammed his acel to max. The engines howled as he went to All Ahead Flank Speed. He could feel himself sweating, panting, inside the command couch's shell.

Twenty minutes.

He did a close flyby on one of the moons, seeing it was nothing more than vast biological factories and spawning pools. He threw decoys out, rotating as he did so, so the 50 gallon barrel sized decoys dropped toward the moon. The reactors were running out of control, the small five kilo antimatter thorium salt reactors getting hotter and hotter, heating up the decoy.

Three minutes after he launched them from the grav drivers they hit and the bright white actinic flash of antimatter explosions was visible behind him as his decoys detonated and blew huge divots out of the moon, atmosphere exploding outward as the three shockwaves roared through the moon.

Vat Grown Luke succor any who were on that doomed place, Sleemas thought as he pulled a high-G turn, practically standing the starflitter on its nose and shooting straight up.

Thirty minutes.

Halfway into the system. 'Above' the stellar mass's orbital ring.

But the noose was tightening as his battlescreen strength rose to 63%.

He was faster than any of them except the spiral shell craft. He was more nimble than any of them.

And he was more heavily armed than he had any right to be.

He knew that he had to break out, but he'd be forced to move within range of their guns.

But Sleemas had decided it was time to play his death song. He knew that the PAWM would dedicate valuable electronic resources, valuable computing power, to decipher the EM emmissions in hope of figuring out the meaning.

"The first time I saw you..." his ship broadcast.

He gunned it, planning on 'scraping' by one of the massive PAWM fleets that had nearly two hundred PAWM machines around a Harvester class machine.

"...was on the screen at Sebastian's house..." rang out.

He ordered the warbois to bake up EW hashes and shake their salted caramel rainbow hash table.

They screeched and jumped up and down with glee.

The huge Harvester class PAWM blinked in electronic surprise when the ship didn't twist away but instead accelerated straight at it. It's shield strength increased and that cannon at the front began spitting shells that tore right through its massive battlescreens to slam deep craters into the PAWM's hull.

"Back then you were so much older than me but now you're a child," sang out on the speakers and from the radio transmitter.

Forty minutes.

Sleemas 'felt' himself battered around as the twisting plucking feeling of near misses with nCV barrages measuring in the hundreds of shells scraped by him. His piloting eVI helped guide his hand as he twisted and dodged shells that were only a 10th of his size.

The shields on the Harvester dropped completely as one of Sleemas's weapons got a chunk of something good, raising up a lance of energy a hundred miles high and twenty miles thick.

As he whipped across the Harvester, less than a mile from its hull, he threw out decoys, ejected too almost-overloaded thermal cores, and slapped open the cage for the insane warbois.

The electronic entities shrieked with glee as they flung themselves out of the creche and at the massive ship. Thousands, millions, billions of access points glimmered and gleamed and sang to the insane electronic warfare eVI's. They leaped into them, slamming through the six digit forty-five character passwords, collapsing firewalls thinner than a stripper's pasties, and swarmed into the Harvester's systems with all the malevolent glee of rabid children descending on a deer made of candy.

As a parting shot Sleemas flared his engines, throwing tens of miles of energy from the drives as he swept barely a mile above the Harvester before shooting past it.

The lance of energy hit the Harvester's engines, which were shielded from outgoing energy, not incoming.

"You didn't have any time to move..." rang out across the system as Sleemas hit the omnibroadcast system.

It's not like you don't know I'm here, he thought to himself.

The Harvester heeled out of formation, tumbling, its vast bulk slamming into more than a few of its ancillary machines that had attempted to reverse course to chase Sleemas.

"We sat and watched as he murdered you..." Sleemas heard.

He altered course, heading toward one of the inhabited planets, his angle making it look like he was getting ready to do an attack run.

His heat was at 75% and rising, his slush level was at 58% and the creation engines were struggling.

"I thought it was safe..."

He was panting as he watched everything in the system alter course to chase him. He could almost feel the panic as he pushed a little more speed out of the craft, moving the engines into what any engineering crew chief would call 'full public sodomy' levels of thrust.

"We wanted to play," he heard as he cut his accel and rolled his craft to face backwards even as he slid toward the planet at .85C.

"Oh brother, we should leave now..." he heard.

not yet, he told himself.

One of the spiral shelled ships were exposed by the angle and he clamped down on the firing stud even as he squeezed the grip, overriding the minimum time between the shots. The nCV cannon thudded rapidly, shaking the whole ship, and damage alerts popped up as stressed components began to crack as he ran through eight shots as fast as the gun would cycle.

"We were led astray..." sang out Sleemas's death song.

The shells hit the phasic battlescreen and on the fourth shot it exploded. Sleemas's instruments saw flesh blow out from the shell as something gave out in a lurid purple flash. Liquid steamed away, so superheated it took nearly a mile distance before it froze.

The other four shots slammed into the neutronium shell.

Sleemas knew the Atrekna on board were probably convinced nothing could penetrate the neutronium shell. It had been impervious since time began, just too difficult to work.

But that had been before the Mad Lemurs of Terra had exploded out into the universe with a primal scream of rage and hatred.

The four shots hit, the first two cracking the shell, the third blowing away shards of armor meters thick.

The last plunged deeply in, the kinetic bleedoff vaporizing, beyond vaporizing the flesh, before the atomic 'seed' went off.

A forty-five megaton blast went off inside the shell. The foot exploded away from the base of the shell even as the shell shattered.

Sleemas flipped his ship over taking an angle that would 'skim' the atmosphere of the planet, and gunned the engines.

"The pastor would say..." the song moved through Sleemas's body, through his mind, through his soul, as he dropped flares, chaff, and strobes, the engines screaming.

"Oh, your sins shall find you out," the line rang out as he eyeballed a speck. It was a massive satellite, a space station, easily big enough to dock a Harvester for unloading.

Sleemas locked it up, aimed, and fired the nCV cannon, ripping through another magazine of eight.

One of the barrels cracked with a snap that felt to Sleemas like half his chest rings fracturing. He coughed blood but inflated his barking sack and barked along with the song.

The Atrekna were enraged, reaching out, pooling their efforts.

The satellite broke up mere seconds before Sleemas, moving at 0.91C, whipped through the debris, his shields flaring. He ejected plasma to make the ionosphere light up as he streaked by and to distract from the swarms of warbois that screamed and jumped from his ship to the computer systems of the planet below with feral shrieks of glee.

Three quarters of the way into the system.

Fifty minutes.

The hits were getting closer now. His shields were taking a pounding and he had to let off the trigger of the nCV cannon and devote the nanoforge to replacing thermal cores and battlescreen projectors.

Fifty...

The Atrekna were finally close enough. The lunged forward and reached out with their strength.

Sleemas felt everything dull. Grow cotton covered. Like an anesthetic beam had struck him fully in the face.

The ship went silent as it streaked forward.

He could feel cold fingers in his mind, cutting the engines, engaging the interial drag system, silencing his weapons, shutting down his craft.

One of the spiral ships moved out of the shadow of one of the trio of moons, moving toward Sleemas's ship. It slowly moved up, vast feathery fringed tentacles unrolling from the foot to grasp his now-silent and dark craft in their grasp.

Sixty-two minutes.

With a sparkle the student's ship appeared.

The beacon Sleemas had left behind went live. Coordinates and jumpspace astrogation data jumped to the student's ship before the little beacon self-destructed. Decoys left behind by Sleemas roared to life, emulating the signature of the student's ship, all peeling away in different directions.

Sleemas could feel the hatred snarling at him as the Atrekna realized what had happened. Could feel the hundreds of minds too far away for anything to reach.

Still, some of the PAWM tried, slowly pulling their bulk into an arc that would take them toward it.

The ship vanished as it translated to jumpspace at the same time as the decoys did, everything going in wildly different directions with different drive strength on the entry pushes.

The Atrekna turned their attention back to the little ship that had denied them.

And the being within.

Sleemas was paralyzed as his ship was pulled into the larger one. The security charges blew on the critical systems and Sleemas distantly felt pleasure. Time went by, his mind still and blanked. He was pulled from his ship, dragged through corridors of slime and sinew, and thrown into an empty gap in the tissue where the opening irised close with a slurping sound.

The pressure released.

The Atrekna eagerly awaited the dismay and grief that they knew would pour from the lizard they had captured.

Instead they were startled as Sleemas started laughing.

---------------

Sleemas was thrown back into his cell by psychic force. He bounced against the wall and collapsed in a heap. He had no answers for any of them.

His head hung down. He knew it was hopeless, that he was dead as soon as they tired of him.

He had been defeated.

It was over.

He heaved a sigh, half resignation, half relief.

He opened his eyes and saw a rose land at his feet.

He looked up to see a lemur dressed all in black, complete with a tall black hat, with a mask across the lemur's face.

"You were defeated," the lemur said.

Sleemas nodded.

"The children escaped," the lemur said. "You were not beaten."

Sleemas nodded again.

The lemur reached out and touched Sleemas and everything went sideways, like the entire universe was made out of strings woven together. Sleemas found himself standing on a lonely planetoid, his faithful little ship, cracked and dented and smoking, parked beside him.

The masked lemur in the black suit and cape looked up at the moon that was large in the sky.

"A serenade fits a beautiful moonlit night," the caped Terran said softly.

-------------

There was a flash at the outer system edges. A bright sparkling flash that attracted all of the PAWM and Dwellerspawn that had been chasing the ship only two days ago. A sparkle like something had left the upper hyperplanes without slowing down.

The scanners were immediately turned to the sparkle but nothing could be detected. A PAWM nearby scanned it with optical sensors and saw it.

Nine bipeds in strange outfits. All of them female lemurs. All with tiaras, all holding strange wands, all with wide expressive eyes. They were following the leader, a blonde who's bangs formed a heart shape on her forehead, with the gem in the center of the tiara in the middle of the heart.

The Lolita Sorceresses of the Sailor Moon Sisterhood had arrived.

------------

Sleemas watched from the planetoid as the 'young girls' assaulted the system. New suns thousands of miles wide devoured Dwellerspawn. A single swing of a glaive shattered everything within a gas giant and returned it to pristine condition.

The Overminds and communal minds in the system tried to grapple with the 'young girls' and found themselves rejected by such incandescent fury that the very bedrock around them shattered into dust as the overmind flashbroiled and the Atrekna that attempted to surppress the 'young girls' as they had suppressed Sleemas exploded into droplets of mist.

The Atrekna could feel the disgust and disdain rippling off of the young girls, who viewed the Atrekna as little more than vermin, the shadow of vermin, a nightmare the universe should have been allowed to wake up from but instead had attached itself to the throat of reality itself like some kind of purple leech.

Sleemas stared with wide eyes as a single scream somehow carried through the vacuum of space and shattered Harvester PAWM machines into nothing more than pebble sized chunks. As objects thrown from the girl's hands hit with the force of a ship of the line's main C+ Cannon when they impacted.

Finally the system was empty of the Atrekna. The sun turned yellow and the stars reappeared.

The tall black clad biped turned to Sleemas.

"My job here is done," it said.

"But... you didn't do anything," Sleemas said.

Instead of answering, the figure twirled, swirling its cape with it.

He vanished, as did the girls.

The last one, the blond with the bangs that formed the shape of a heart, vanished last.

She left with a "hmph" and a sparkle.

Sleemas moved over to his battered craft and climbed in.

He shook his head as he fired up the engines.

The Mad Lemurs of Terra indeed.