First Contact

Chapter 948: The Setting Sun

Searching for The Terror, the Warsteel Forerunners, is always dangerous.

In all of our xenoscientific history, no species has ever been as dangerous as the Warsteel Forerunners and their artifacts. Some have postulated that the Warsteel Forerunners received some kind of aphrodisiac benefit from war material and violence geared materials.

There are what is assumed to be erotic (To The Terror) and sexual images on such things as tanks, aerospace fighters, atmospheric strikers, even weapons and non-powered body armor. The image of the red haired female Terror with a sword is prevalent across many different weapons and vehicles.

This has been referred to as "The M.A.D. Archangel Terrasol" in writings by other species, and it is the believe of xenoscience that this female Terror was some kind of religious figure. She is always depicted as having a wrathful expression and in the process of delivering terrible violence upon her foes, uncaring of the blood spray of her victims.

The idea that the creation of war material had a sexual component to The Terror fits across many different artifacts and recovered information. A few media historical media recordings, such as Six Siblings Six Sixguns shows that male and female Terror would find themselves overcome with arousal and indulge in violent sex during or after close quarters combat.

Terror sexual intercourse is also quite violent, as evident from recovered media, as seems to be a primary focus, culturally, for The Terror, looking more like combat grappling or domination grappling than the more careful and gentle sexual intercourse of all other species. Whether this is biological, a factor of their genitalia arrangement, or psychological is unknown.

Interestingly enough, it appears that Terror sexual drives and urges even led them to cross-species sexual encounters.

While some those reviewing this data may be rolling their eyes at the discussion of the sexual habits of an extinct species within this document that explores Terror artifacts, relics, and xeno-archeology sites, the fact that sex, eroticism, and arousal is intrinsically linked to Terror weaponry and vehicles.

After all, the most common symbol discovered at Warsteel Forerunner archeology sites is the crude depiction of Terror male genitalia and female mammary glands. - Excerpt from: Strevik'al Report of Warsteel Forerunner sites, 1681 Current Era

The psychical biological remains of the Warsteel Forerunners, the Terror, the Mad Lemurs of Terra, should be a researchers first clue that the Warsteel Forerunners are unlike any xenospecies discovered across the Galactic Spur.

First of all, they were endothermic, using liquid H2O perspiration and respiration to regulate a high body temperature that is estimated to be roughly 37C. However, they could operate and easily survive internal core body temperatures as low as 35.5C and as high as 40.5C, giving them an internal operating range of 5C. Most species have an operating temperature fluctuation of 2C, and even then medical attention could be mandated.

Additionally, their immune system used high internal heat, sometimes as high as 41C, to help fight infection, disease, even injury.

I would like you take a minute to imagine being able to operate with a core body temperature a full two degrees above normal and still being able to engage in physical or intellectual activities.

Now, add onto the fact that the Warsteel Forerunners could operate, comfortably and without physical distress, in a wide difference in external temperatures. Additionally, with simple tight weave organic thread clothing a Warsteel Forerunner can survive extremes of temperatures that would be deadly to the majority of xenospecies in the Known Galaxy.

While it is true that some species can tolerate lower temperatures without protection than the Warsteel Forerunners, or higher temperatures, there is none other species that can operate in such a wild extreme with minimal protective requirements.

Due to their bone density and the fact it is basically a 'foamed' solid system, and their extremely dense muscle mass that uses unidirectional power (Warsteel Terror muscles can only 'pull' as in contract, not even twist, unlike virtually every other species) and heavily designed joints, The Terror is able to withstand wildly different gravities as well as endure G shocks that would kill any other species through broken bones.

Their respiratory system is heavily protected by mucus membrames, mucus production, and other systems. Their gas exchange rate is extremely high compared to their lung volume, meaning their lungs were highly effective. Their resistance to pollen, bacteria, viruses, and other airborne debris required multiple simulations before researchers were even willing to entertain the idea the data could be even partially true.

Their audio and visual ranges are quite high, with a broad spectrum. Additionally their skin had small hairs on it to help detect everything from air movement to physical touches. The Warsteel Forerunners had fully interlocked and highly developed 'six senses', to include: touch, taste, hearing, sight, smell, and psychological. Unlike other species, one sense is not dulled at the expense of another. To further use their senses, Warsteel Forerunners were apparently able to block incoming sensation from one or more senses to concentrate on one or more others without causing confusion.

Unlike virtually all other species, the Warsteel Forerunners do not slip into a euphoric haze of chemicals when mortally wounded. Rather than endorphins and dopamine overload, the Warsteel Forerunners suffered a massive dump of adrenaline and other combat chemicals, with endorphins and dopamine used to bypass the pain of the wound.

This means, where other species would close their eyes and become lost in invoked memory stimulation of bliss, the Warsteel Forerunners have their instinct to survive chemically supercharged, resulting in increased strength, endurance, pain resistance, and aggression. Pain, fatigue, doubt, all of it washed away by a cascade of fighting chemicals pouring into their blood for what can last for literal hours.

You combine all of it with the brain of an aggressive predator with unconscious predictive analysis capability, self-adaptive and neural programmable reflexive actions with trainable muscle memory, the ability to alter their hunting strategy from persistence to ambush to rapid assault, excellent pattern recognition, and the ability to block out pain signals, and you have a nightmare made flesh.

There is far far more in this report regarding the physiology of the Warsteel Forerunners, and we, the writers, encourage the researchers, scientists, and military personnel who intend on examining Warsteel Forerunner sites to be extremely careful.

What would not even inconvenience a Warsteel Forerunner, in regards to sound, light, temperature, smell, atmospheric contamination, or vibration may prove deadly to any researchers. - Excerpt From: Warsteel Forerunner Biology: A Study in Madness, 2891 Current Era

I tell ya, I about shit myself.

We were examining a Warsteel Forerunner xenoarcheological site a few years back. A big one. We're talking multiple buildings, multiple vehicles. Hell, there were even undisturbed remains. All of it buried under volcanic ash from where the Warsteel Forerunners had finished off their enemy with a low-yield planet cracker as a final act of defiance.

I was deep into one of the buildings. A vehicle maintenance shop, complete with mechanized bipedal robot combat armors, armored vehicles, even light power armor. Tools, work racks, all of it. The building was hermetically sealed and had filtered internal air.

Ever seen a Warsteel Forerunner clean room air filter? They used porous ceramic. It's incredibly effective at even cleaning prions and mid-length chain proteins.

The bay I was in was spooky. There were dead green mantids, most of them with the evidence of a phasic attack that ruptured their chitin down their backs and the back of their skulls. There were dead from all of the Fallen Confederacy races. For the most part, they were obvious. They were dry, the environmental system keeping the air at low humidity.

One of the robot combat armors was huge. One hundred meters high, thirty meters wide. Bristling with weapons. Armor so thick it made it feel like your eyeballs were being squished just staring at it.

At the orders of the High Marshall, I climbed up the scaffolding and up to the open pilot access at the back of it.

I'm telling you, I was nervous as hell. The whole place was spooky. Dim red lights, the humming of machinery that should have been long dead but still worked.

Did I mention the place still had power?

So, I get up into the machine and move inside. I'm not sure what to expect. Just as I step onto a flat area, my flash goes out.

I take two steps, banging on it, when I bump something.

My flash comes on just as I look up.

A Warsteel Forerunner is swooping toward me!

It was in a pilot suit, hands outstretched, arms wide, mouth open, cold dead eyes staring at me.

It stops just in front of me and I realize.

It's in a pilot's full motion harness. I'd bumped it and it had swung away from me then swung back.

I quit for the day, changed my wet pants, and drank the rest of the night. - Discussion at a luncheon, Warsteel Forerunner Symposium, 487 Current Era

Nakteti sidestepped the little robot, a flat circle with hoverpads and a cleaning system on the bottom, as it buffed the metal floor of the corridor. The lights were white, sodium bulbs, and left no shadows anywhere in the corridor. Esoteric directions were on the walls, many with lines that would show a traveler the path to take to reach their destination.

"It's almost startling that its always so clean in these stations," Nakteti said quietly. Magnus and Surscee just nodded. "I know it's the low level cleaning VI's that gathered up the bodies and cleaned up the messes, as well as repaired any damage, but part of me feels there should be bodies laying around and damage from the Enraged Ones still present."

"We like it clean," Magnus said, shrugging.

"It's just kind of weird, like at any second the next shift is going to report for duty and the whole place will come back to life," Nakteti said.

"We merely lay in our grave dreaming," Surscee said.

Like Nakteti, both Magnus and Surscee were wearing environmental suits, painted crimson, with an autopolarizing visor and a layer of iron oxide doped mylar. Where Nakteti carried a light magac pistol in addition to the sword across her back, Magnus and Surscee only carried swords and dagger.

Of course, just because the sword was an archaic weapon design, didn't mean the weapons were archaic. The twins carried nanite infused weaponry designed to heighten and enhance their phasic abilities and their mastery of the nanites both produced with an internal organ dedicated to creating them.

They've got a literal nanoforge in their chests and act like it's no big deal, Nakteti mused, snorting to herself.

The lines led to her destination, winding through the station.

Upgrade and Refit Command.

The It Tastes Sweet was docked, connected by umbilical and gantries to the station's robotic repair and refit equipment. The entire process could be automated.

Except for the authorization, which Nakteti had to physically authorize.

Chuck had tried, but the keys were physical and there were no hard light hologram projectors in the room.

Nakteti knew it was a security function to prevent a DS from boarding the station and authorizing repairs and upgrades that might be forbidden to civilians or unauthorized ships.

Except the station was on M.A.D. protocols and everything was authorized and available.

Providing it was in the datasets.

Nakteti sat down in one of the chairs at the supervisor section, waiting for the ergonomic chair to adjust to her. Once that was done, she brought up the holographic keyboard and booted up the system. As soon as the BIOS screen flashed she hit CNTRL-F1 to move into the BIOS. Following the instructions that Chuck had given her, having her datalink display the instructions on her retina, she lowered the maximum fidelity to 320p and primarily text, turning off the majority of the GUI.

"OK, it's booting up," Nakteti said.

"All right, I'll walk you through it," Chuck said through the suit radio. "We'll want to scan The Sweet first, let the station due a full refit deep level molecular scan."

Nakteti followed the directions, watching the episodes of Charlie the Moomoo Tender that were in the database in the long spaces where the system was working without her input. Twice she napped, and another time she watched a few episodes of Girlz Und Lankies as well as Girlz Und Bolos.

It was slow, time consuming, and boring, but Nakteti was old enough to understand that sometimes the most important things were the ones that were the most boring and took the longest.

Chuck handled a lot of the automatic systems. Magnus amused himself by getting various fruits from the nutriforge in the office area, locking out the system, then sitting down with a few rows of work stations between him and his sister and slowly peeling or slicing the fruit while grinning at Surscee.

Surscee acted aloof and distant for about half of it, the other half trying to use her 'magic' to take the fruit from Magnus.

Nakteti had learned to ignore the twins' dominance games.

Finally the station's automated repair and refit systems had processed the data from the It Tastes Sweet and had opened up the various menus.

Five times she had to use the keys that Magnus and Surscee had found in the Graves Registration Personal Effects section to authorize changes. Every time it had taken Magnus, Surscee, and Nakteti to insert and turn the keys at the same time.

She sat and watched through the monitors as the system removed the hull plating from the rear of the Sweet and mounted four more engines, rebuilding the superstructure, running the necessary mechanical systems, adding more computing, another power plant, and then putting the hull plating back on.

Red Space Engines had been easy to find. The station had computed that she'd need two engines to jump to Redspace for a superluminal jump.

Nakteti had doubled it.

She watched as parts of the hull were removed and the Sweet's sensor systems were replaced.

Self-Correcting Polymorphic Wide Range Scanning Systems was what was listed in the directory.

She watched as the top and bottom plating was removed from her ship and the jumpcores and the hypercores were replaced. The inertial compensator system was replaced. The artificial gravity, the antigravity, and the counter-grav systems replaced. The environmental system was upgraded.

It took extra long because the Sweet was designed to break into multiple components and she ensured that the separate components were all upgraded.

M.A.D. protocols meant the fees were waived.

She watched the station's mass tanks drop by nearly a third. Saw the automated system send bulk carriers to the nearby gas giant to refill from the hidden refining facility that was hidden by atmosphere of the gas giant.

Nakteti ordered up protective systems as well as personal armor and environmental suits to be stocked. Ordered shielded nanoforges and creation engines.

Part of her wished she could mount a Class XXXIV Creation Engine, but her ship was too small.

Still, she made sure that the components that could separate had their own creation engines.

She also added more mass tanks.

The concept of a tesseract mass tank made her head hurt, but she got the gist. She also had low pressure and high pressure tanks added.

She sat and waited while the ship had redundancy systems run through it, right down to plastic wrapped copper wire conduits and silicon wafer computer systems. She could have basic ship function even if all the molycircs fried out.

Twice she rubbed the upraised scar on the back of her hand, the twisted rune covered with matte black material that felt like an insect's carapace, as she watched the Sweet be rebuilt.

The last part was loading the software into the upgraded computer systems.

What she needed wasn't in the warship section, which was where Chuck had figured it would reside. It wasn't in the Miscellanous section like Surscee had guessed. It wasn't even in the nutriforge fruit template storage section like Magnus had grinningly suggested.

It was in the scientific exploration section. In deep cold storage.josei

It took nearly three days to retrieve, unpack, and decrypt.

Redspace and Deadspace navigation programs.

She was silent as she walked back to her ship, Magnus and Surscee following, Chuck riding safely in the armored and Fairy-Day caged block she was carrying on her back.

It took nearly an hour for her ship to disconnect and be cleared to leave the station. The station's tugs moved the Sweet away from the station to a safe distance.

She took the ship to jumpspace for two light years, coming out less than ten minutes later in between the star systems, just sitting silently in the dark. She brought up the new drives, charged the core, and went down through the checklist displayed on her retina.

"Ready?" Nakteti asked, looking at her skeleton crew.

Magnus smiled and nodded. Surscee just nodded, her expression grave. Chuck blinked the LED's and showed a smiley face.

Nakteti reached forward and pressed the button.

The It Tastes Sweet vanished from the universe.