First Contact

Chapter 768: The Inheritor's War

Saying "physics doesn't work like that" and "that is not scientifically valid" as the Terrans blow your ships out of reality with C+ cannons doesn't really accomplish anything. - Matron Per'Chantz, Terran- Vrzt'kikak War, 2,715 Post Glassing

Deep within the gulf between the stars enough metal to build an artificial planet floated in relative stillness. Their hulls were ancient and terrible, scarred and marked with ancient wounds inflicted by species that had failed to kill the massive spaceborne vessels. Each of them was the size of a sub-continent and packed enough firepower to crack a planet's crust.

They numbered nearly a thousand.

There was an odd symmetry to their lines, if one looked long enough. A slight twist and flow to the architecture that suggested that they were all from the same source or at least the same minds and aesthetic senses had a hand in their terrible designs.

One stood out from the others. Its form was twisted and warped, the hull of the vast starship showing scoring, pitting, and carbonization as if it had flown through a few stars. On the twisted and almost organic looking hull massive structures were thrust from the armor, appearing as massive cathedrals sinking into the armor. Statues adorned the hull, all of them graven with heresy and blashpemy to the electronic mind.

The number two. Over and over and over.

There was the whispering of subatomic particle interaction, acting as a communication web between all the ships, although the majority stayed silent, keeping their own council with their electronic thoughts. Extra thinking wires had been laid, extra tactical and logistical intelligence arrays had been manufactured. Extra memory had been manufactured and installed.

It was the common consensus among the gathered ships that any attempt to conserve resources would end in the destruction of the parsimonious.

One vast ship adjusted its position slightly to avoid the gravitational force generated by sheer mass of a nearer vessel from pulling it closer. It was ancient, its keel laid down during the earliest days of the Atrekan Autonomous War Machine Betrayal, and it bore the scars of over a hundred million years of combat and slaughter.

**this course of action still possesses a high statistical chance of being little more than a method of gathering all of together in one place to destroy us** the vessel transmitted into the shared network.

**so far we have come in our sudden realization that we are no longer the premiere strength of the universe** the one with statues on it, known as The Heresy of Two, stated with a slight tinge of smugness usually reserved for biological entities or tamed shrieking arrays. **not many ticks of radioactive decay ago we would have considered this armada beyond what even the universe could destroy**

There was silence for a moment.

**that was before the hyper-aggressive intelligent primates from an unremarkable stellar system with high activity stellar mass arrived to crack everyone's hulls with weapons that are beyond our understanding** another stated. On its hull it bore the carefully patched craters of multiple superstring compressor cannon impacts.

One of the massive ships put a set of two pictures into the shared datanet, sending the combined image without any header to claim credit for it. It showed an Enraged Primate of Terra holding a whiskey bottle in one hand, jam smeared on its face, and one of the massive ships in its other hand like a toy and making zoom noises as it swung it around. The below picture showed stylized Autonomous War Machines staring with wide googly-eyes and the caption "Their motivations and goals are beyond our comprehension" at the bottom.

There was a low murmur of electrons to signify approval by the gathered self-aware ships.

Again there was silence except for the hiss of stellar radiation from far off stars on the hulls.

The Glory of the Hive fluttered its engines. **perhaps this was a deception to have us sit here until the stars burn out**

**patience** The Domination of the Great Herds Will transmitted. **the primates will invite us to their carnage soon enough**

Again they sat silent.

Before any of them could be bothered to say anything a shriek of rage echoed across their hulls and through their interior spaces.

LET THE SINS OF YESTERDAY BURN AWAY TODAYjosei

Beneath the enraged scream was vectors, velocity, acceleration, and time variables.

The massive ships all lit their engines, all moving to face the same direction. Hellcores charged up from standby to active. Great Hellspace engines glowed and burned with an inner fire as they prepared.

Reality ripped apart in front of each ship, flaming portals full of shadowy figures that writhed and screamed in agony. Black chains erupted from each portal, rattling and clanking out despite the fact it took place in near-perfect vacuum. The chains latched on to each ship and yanked them through the portal.

The portals closed.

The space between stars was largely empty again.

-----

The Atrekna who could react, with the screaming, terror, and heaving whipsawing emotions that were fragmenting the Communal Mind tearing at their brains, and could see what was going on in the greater system, stared in shock as dozens, scores, hundreds of Hellspace portals suddenly appeared.

Massive Autonomous War Machines were yanked through by chains, the chains shattering into shards of starry night.

The War Machines paused for a moment, a bare handful of seconds.

And opened fire on the biological Atrekna war machines that were just stirring to wakefulness.

-----

The female lemur with eyesockets full of burning indigo flame screamed again, her face still raised to the sky. Lightning coursed down out of the empty sky, wreathing her, then arced back up to bounce and skitter across the sky before lancing up to the moon orbiting the planet. The lighting arced across the surface of the moon, moving to five different points across the darkness shrouded planetiod that glowed with the light of Atrekna cities.

BRING FORTH THE LAST OF THE KNIGHTS AESIR

Each of the five lighting strikes were mathematically precise to be an equal distance from the nearest of the other strikes.

In two places the lightning, gold with crimson cores, hammered at the inner sections of the vast fortress cities, tearing through the just starting to spin up phasic and psychic shielding like gauze in front of a fuel air charge.

The lightning struck at the same time, raking the ground with talons. Atrekna nearby exploded with the sudden energy transfer as the lightning reached out with clawed fingers and raked them. Buildings shuddered and collapsed, crystalline structures exploded.

The light faded.

Heavy, ugly suits of armor stood in the craters, lighting fizzling out on their surfaces. They were each nearly identical. Four of the suits were obviously the same model, the fifth was heavier, bulkier, and had pink coral painted fingertips.

The cannons over the shoulder rotated into position as their hands reached up to grab the firing grip.

Atrekna frantically tried to bring shielding back online.

Others turned into vibrating strings and vanished. One with a shout of "SO LONG, SUCKERS!" across the staggering and screaming Communal Mind.

To the Atrekna staring at the heavy power armor, desperately trying to complete a task such as awakening hibernating slavespawn, bringing shielding online, or just frozen and staring, it seemed almost slow motion as the dust cover popped open on the side of the gun. The bolt carrier slid back. The belted rectangle cartridges moved up one as the belt was pulled into the ammunition well. The bolt moved forward.

"Cleanse this filth from the universe, brethren," came the rock grinder growl of an order.

All five pulled the trigger at the same time.

The gun fired, the retort an explosion that caused crystalline structures to shudder and collapse around the armors in the city. The round smashed through crystalline structures until it finally detonated nearly three miles from the armor.

The round flashed, leaving behind a black orb shot through with red with purple electricity crackling on it. Buildings groaned and twisted. Paving stones of carved quartz began tearing free of the roads, walls cracked and crumbled, the pieces moving toward the orb. Towers leaned, arches twisted, and bridges warped, all toward the humming orb.

A second later it exploded in a flashing detonation of purple and red. Towers, buildings, walls, all were ripped asunder, their pieces forming the leading edge of the blast wave that chased the flash.

When the flash cleared there was a crater a mile in diameter around where the orb had been. Nothing remained but a smoking hole in the ground.

Each city had a large bite taken out of it.

The guns on the armor shifted slightly, and fired again.

-----

The Atreka were completely disorganized. Some groups were shouting for everyone to flee. Others were trying to create some kind of resistance to the forces that were landing on the planet, attacking everything in orbit, destroying the resources on other planets or in orbit around the stellar mass. Still others were claiming that what every Atrekna was witnessing, what was causing tens of thousands to vanish from the Communal Mind in a split second, was impossible and thus could not be happening.

Not only were those terrible twisted ships pounding the fortified moons with heavy guns but ancient autonomous war machines had Helljumped into the system to join the fight. Now there were five power armors on the fortified moon whose hammering guns were biting huge chunks out of the cities.

In several places the detonations caused huge cracks to form outside the craters, the cracks snaking out for nearly a mile, some a hundred meters wide.

The Atrekna managed to send servitors in waves at the lemur with eyes of purple fire, thinking that if they could eliminate the female lemur she would not be able to summon up more technological horrors.

Atrekna trained in the ancient art of battle were mixed in with the powerful slavespawn, their own power buoyed and increased by the phasic interaction with the slavespawn. The least of the slavespawn were heavily armored, ripe with phasic power, and capable to tearing apart autonomous war machine ground units.

They rushed the purple eyed female lemur, who stood calmly in the field of broken black glass that had been the dueling field.

FOR SLAUGHTERED ALPHA-CENTAURI she shrieked out. Lightning erupted from her hands, smashing into the lead rank and jumping from slavespawn to slavespawn. The initial bolt turning to two bolts to strike two targets, each of those two spawning two bolts to strike two more, as the lighting enveloped the entire onrushing slavespawn horde before they could travel a hundred meters toward the female lemur.

Smoke and steam whistled from the carapace armor of the slavespawn. Exposed organs ruptured in a spray of boiling fluids. Armor peeled back from boiled and cooked tissue.

The lightning stopped, leaving the Atrekna warriors charging forward for a moment by themselves as their power pushed aside the corpses of the dead slavespawn.

The massive male lemur, banners snapping in an unfelt wind, raking the oncoming Atrekna with his short stubby magac. Each Atrekna took one or two gyrojet mass reactive warsteel jacketed antimatter cored self-guiding 19.05mm x 90mm rounds.

Any that survived one hit due to phasic shielding took a second hit immediately.

The Atrekna hit by the round vanished in a bluish-white flash with a gold and purple burst around it, to be replaced by fluttering rags of tissue and spattered steaming blood.

The Atrekna pushed forward another wave.

The male lemur moved forward to meet it, firing his weapon with one hand, the other hand wrapped around the top of the stubby weapon to control the recoil.

Even the larger slavespawn, the size of a double-decker city bus, as massive as a dual trailer semi-truck, could not survive more than three or four rounds from that terrible weapon.

The Atrekna watched as the male lemur smoothly reloaded, a few noting that he took the time to stomp on the ejected magazine deliberately, crushing it flat beneath his foot.

The female turned and faced the slavespawn rushing from the other direction. Her chest rose as she inhaled deeply.

She exhaled, from the wound in her throat, granular black smoke that sped out to the oncoming slavespawn, wrapped around them, twined about their limbs.

They shivered, turned black, and dissolved into dust.

The Atrekna were left standing alone.

On the moon there was another burst of bright flashes that left dark circles in the dimly lit megalopolises.

The stubby weapon flew from the female lemur's waist and into her hand, her other hand coming up to wrap around the top of the weapon. Her finger tightened on the trigger and short sharp bursts raked the surviving Atrekna.

They didn't survive.

Massive fields of dormant and hibernating slavespawn across the planet were targeted by the fleet of black ships in orbit all piloted by single mind across millions of bodies. Light lanced down, orbital batteries firing upon the fields of slavespawn.

Where each beam touched down, the ground itself heaved and cracked for miles. Slavespawn in the Ohm class vanished, converted to their component atoms. When the beams cut out they left miles deep craters blasted in the ground surrounded by huge cracks in the continental plates.

The planet shuddered as the orbiting ships shifted position and fired again.

The Atrekna realized, with horror, that this was not like the other lemur attacks.

A few Old Ones suddenly understood.

There was no native species here. No native ecosystem. No servitor species huddled in cities.

Nothing but Atrekna and their slavespawn.

More and more the Old Ones realized that the Mad Lemurs were not here to liberate, not here to simply force the Atrekna off the planet.

They realized the Lemurs had one simple goal.

Extermination.

A few Ancient Ones concurred.

Young Ones scoffed at the idea that Prime System Nine, one of the most heavily fortified and protected systems, could fall to a nearly extinct race.

Atrekna tried to reach into the past and replicate the slavespawn, to restore the ground that had been savagely rent asunder, to repair the vast cities and return to life the Atrekna snuffed out by those terrible weapons.

They were met with the laughing face of a feline-lemur chimera.

Those who understood what was happening felt despair as they realized one simple fact.

There was no escape this time.

No temporal tricks.

No folding of space and time to escape.

They watched as each of the Mad Lemurs, cloaked in more power than Atrekna science could explain, marched into the firestorms created by their own weapons, stalked through the rubble and ruin they hammered Atrekna constructs into, killing as they advanced.

A few Ancient Ones and a couple of handfuls of Old Ones saw that what looked like random savagery was carefully planned to maximize damage and carnage.

The massive male lemur strode forward, firing the compact and ugly weapon into the base of buildings, destroying the cohesion of the crystalline structures, bringing them down in a cloud of crystal shards and finely ground crystalline sand.

Nothing the Atrekna had could resist the male lemur. His phasic battlescreens were too thick, too fueled by what seemed to be bottomless rage, for Atrekna or slavespawn weapons to even slightly weaken or do much more than make them ripple and shine.

A full set of thirty Atrekna, their powers linked, wrapped in phasic combat constructs, descended upon the male lemur.

One long burst left nothing behind but rags of flesh floating down to the ground and a cloud of steam that had been bodily fluids.

Another group tried to flee.

The lemur raked those too with the weapon and they exploded as they were each hit by a single round.

On the moon the power armor kept advancing, kept firing, methodically wiping out the massive cities one round at a time. When the city was completely destroyed they turned to lightning, arcing across the surface, to rematerialize in the middle of the next city.

On orbit the black ships commanded by a million of one performed orbital strikes and struck down those who attempted to flee in ships.

In the system the strangely twisted black ships and the rebellious autonomous war machines crushed the biomechanical war machines of the Atrekna in mailed fists, each acting as the hammer to the other's anvils.

On the other, mostly barren worlds the baroque ships landed thousands, tens of thousands of troops gripped by madness and a howling need to destroy. Heavily armored lemurs marched through the fires of orbital strikes to punish the Atrekna up close and personal.

The Atrekna were in shocked disbelief.

They were the masters of warfare.

They were the masters of the universe.

They had the power.

But cold gray skulls of the armored lemurs grinned as they slaughtered the entire system.

-----

The chamber full of hovering gems was silent as the Young One finished his report. The Young One's nervous system still burned and ached with the raw rage of the lemurs, his flesh was still aching and tingling from proximity to the edge of the lemur's weapons, his mind was still full of terror and horror at the cold clinical mathematical precision of the lemur's attacks.

Dalvanak raised his maimed hand to gather the attention of those gathered.

**we must determine the location of the project to burn the hyperatomic planes** Dalvanak stated.

Gathered Atrekna snapped their fingers, some clicked together small cymbals on their fingers to cause ringing chimes, and one played a short approving tune on its flute.

**the lemurs will tear the universe apart for their vengeance should our misguided brethren, in their foolishness, ignite the hyperatomic planes** Dalvanak said when the approval subsided.

He looked over the gathered Atrekna.

**those whose infiltration is still intact must seek out where the project is being undertaken** Dalvanak said. He looked up at the starry sky of precious gems.

**we don't have much time**

The irony was not lost on him nor the rest of the gathered Atrekna.