First Contact

Chapter 741: The Inheritor's War

I might not be able to win but I can keep you from winning, - Unknown, Terra, Bronze Age Collapse, Pre-Glassing

When both sides are convinced they're about to lose, they're both right - Arch-Demon Murphy's Laws of Combat

CHROME ENUMERATE THE RECENTLY DECEASED! - Konlan the Destroyer, Hyperion Age, Pre-Glassing Terra

Why don't we just wait here for a while, see what happens? - McKreely, Age of Paranoia, Terra, Pre-Glassing, Context Unknown

Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd listened to the female lemur as she babbled, nodding along. Finally, the lemur slammed her fist against her opposite pectoral on her armor, the plasteel reinforcement in the glove clashing loudly against the warsteel. The female lemur turned away and hurried out of the tent.

Naktrix leaned over to Shakras and whispered. "Did you catch any of that?"

Shakras nodded. "The cloning banks ceased working and melted down. Unknown causes."

"So what they have is all they have," Naktrix said, his ears flicking nervously. He looked at the map of the world that Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd was looking at and swallowed. "Think it will be enough?"

Shakras shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I hope it is."

Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd didn't hear her two servants speaking. She was busy staring at the hologram and watching the shelter statuses.

Jumpblok Mk 1 Civ Shelter - Pre-Launch Checklist at 54%

It was old, from the beginning of the war against the Dwellerspawn. It had originated on a planet that Naktrix was very familiar with, his home of Telkan-2.

He had been in Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd's service, not on his home planet, when Second Telkan had happened, so he had no idea the origins of the shelter.

He only knew that it was designed to evacuate the population.

As he watched, the percentage ticked over to 55%.

"We need to ensure that her Ladyship is evacuated, should everything go wrong," Naktrix whispered.

Shakras nodded. "Let us go speak to the lemurs."

Together the two servants left the tent.

Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd didn't notice, she was watching the hologram. Whole areas were flashing red, some amber, some yellow. The blue and green areas were shrinking slowly as more and more units were engaged in combat.

"All I can do is try my best, my lovelies," she said softly. "I pray it is enough."

-----

The Atrekna had been throwing everything they could bring forward the lemurs for four days. Slavespawn, autonomous war machines, even Atrekna psychic units.

Every time they managed to gain ground they paid for it in blood.

It was becoming harder and harder to bring forward more units, the chronotrons becoming exhausted. The massive temporal resonances through the system made it even more difficult, although it was no longer as impossible at it had been two years ago, it was still immensely difficult and getting more and more difficult each shift.

The lemurs munition supplies seemed endless. Artillery and rockets pounded the Atrekna lines. Aerospace fighters and grav strikers howled in on white knuckle bombing and strafing runs, taking horrific casualties to accomplish their missions, but leaving behind nothing but burnt and destroyed autonomous war machines and slavespawn.

Several times the strikers had dropped from the skies to make a strafing run on Atrekna Conclaves and Quorums that they had somehow spotted.

Every tree, every bush, every blade of grass, every chunk of building debris, every shattered windowframe, had a lemur with a radio, spyglasses, and a gun behind them.

The Atrekna Overmind claimed the Atrekna were winning.

To the forces engaged in the fighting, it felt like they were losing.

The Atrekna on the ground, most of which had never fought the Mad Lemurs of Terra before, had discovered one of the basic rules of warfare.

When you are short of everything but the enemy, you are in combat.

The Atrekna engaged in the fighting had learned not to under-estimate the lemurs. They were resilient, able to shrug off mortal wounds long enough to kill one more Atrekna, able to ignore injuries, deprivation, and even direct psychic attacks as long as it meant killing one more Atrekna or slavespawn.

Even the slavespawn were slowly learning fear. Many of the Ohm Class slavespawn refused to move unless it was surrounded by lesser slavespawn, their dim minds aware that just out of sight was probably two or three lemurs armed with anti-tank weaponry.

The Overmind, which was barely set up on the planet, shrieked at the Ohm Class, which just stubbonly ignored it and sat eating rather than moving to the front lines.

One Atrekna found evidence that the lemurs were nearby and reported it.

Other Atrekna showed up, radiating disbelief that the Young One had actually discovered the evidence it claimed. The Overmind shrieked in rage when it was confirmed.

Some dastardly lemur had snuck up on the grazing Ohm Class slavespawn and painted on the side of it a crude drawing of an Atrekna having several large large disembodied male lemur genitalia in it's mouth with the words "I

The Atrekna were offended by the scrawled drawing. They gathered up, staring at it, discussing just whose fault it was that the lemur got close enough to a grazing Ohm Class slavespawn to paint such a thing on its armored carapace.

The Young One was chastised for not keeping careful watch on the slavespawn and sent away while the Ancient Ones discussed what to do about such an offensive painting.

The Ohm Class slavespawn just chewed on a bunch of bushes and moved forward a meter to eat some more, dimly happy with the food.

The Ancient Ones turned and began to leave when one Ancient One looked at the back of one of the Ancient Ones who had stood at the edge of the Conclave during the discussions.

It had a piece of paper on its back!

A piece of paper with a crude drawing of an Atrekna on it with wavy lines coming off of it and "HURR DURR!" written above its head, and an arrow pointing at the crudely drawn Atrekna from the words "Has no dick".

The Ancient Ones immediately cast around looking for whatever lemur had placed that piece of offensive paper on the Ancient One's back while some of them chastised the Ancient One for not noticing that a lemur had snuck up on it.

**STOP DOING THAT LEMURS** one of the Ancient Ones screeched at the woods.

The Atrekna had learned that going into the woods after the lemurs was just a painful way of committing suicide.

In the cities not a single building higher than ten stories still stood. Those buildings not destroyed by the slavespawn had been demolished in such a way that they had fallen on large groups of slavespawn. Each city had scores of pathways that Ohm Class slavespawn had driven into the cities before the lemurs had managed to kill the massive slavespawn.

The cities were burning, covered with a pall of gray smoke and the stench of burning slavespawn.

The Atrekna in the cities were careful to keep to cover, moving slowly. Exposing themselves attracted a sniper round, a rocket, or in a few cases, a thrown spear.

But the Atrekna didn't die alone.

There the Atrekna managed to overrun a division of lemurs, killing them to the last lemur. It cost them tens of thousands of slavespawn and nearly a hundred Atrekna, but they had managed to take the city, only to find it completely empty.

The victory was short-lived.

A lemur rocket attack detonated atomics in the one hundred kiloton range around the city.

By the time the Atrekna recovered, the lemurs had flooded back into the city and dug in, forcing the Atrekna to fight step by step back into the radioactive ruins of the city.

They won again, but at a horrendous cost.

The Atrekna sullenly dug into the ruins, taking possession of the wreckage they had wanted to take nearly intact, not ruined and full of howling chronotron radiation that prevented even temporal lensing.

But the Atrekna knew, if they abandoned the city, they lemurs would just move back in and they would have to fight to dislodge the lemurs again.

Another city, this one far to the north and dedicated to extracting petroleum from the ocean floor, the Atrekna and the slavespawn that were capable of independent thought were pretty sure they had all died and gone to Hell.

The lemur troops, the ragged remnants of the defenders, struck from hiding before running away. They were out of rockets, out of grenades, but they had their laser rifles and their projectile rifles and made highly effective use of them as they ambushed Atrekna themselves.

But that wasn't the worst part.

It was the autonomous robots.

The only warning a slavespawn or an Atrekna would get was an ear piercing shrill robotic scream before a robot would leap from the snowy ground, a rotary blade leading the way, to slice and tear at whatever it hit. Slavespawn too close to the ground found dozens of the mechanical circular saws burrowing up from the ground with a short shriek to leap into their guts and shred them.

The robots always pulled the dead under the ground.

For what purpose, the Atrekna did not know.

But that wasn't the worst.

Every Atrekna learned to fear the sound of an immature lemur asking "Can I come with you?"

It wasn't an immature lemur.

It was a killer robot.

Then came the worst part and even the forming Overmind refused to believe.

Atrekna would hear the 'sounds' of psychic distress and arrive to find a wounded Atrekna on the ground, holding an injury and writhing in pain. Atrekna who moved up, eagerly, to drag away the wounded one to implant it with larvae quickly discovered the truth.

It was another killer robot.

That rock over there?

Killer robot.

That wrecked vehicle? Killer robot.

The dead lemur soldier? Two killer robots.

That killer robot over there? A lemur soldier with a big knife.

The Atrekna that had survived constantly complained to the Overmind that there was nothing in the cold, snowy, and miserable port city worth the constant depletion of lives. Temporal stabilizers had smashed the timestream flat and no replication could take place.

The Overmind insisted that it had been a lemur base and if the Atrekna left, the lemurs would just reoccupy the base.

The Atrekna informed the Overmind that the base was probably made entirely out of killer robots and they would like to go anywhere but the cold snow-dusted radioactive city.

Bit by bit the Atrekna slowly whittled at the lines of the lemurs, pushing them back further and further.

True, more often than not all the Atrekna received for their trouble was radioactive ruins and blasted terrain, completely worthless without even the possibility of temporal replication.

But somehow it had gone beyond strategic reasonings.

Most of the Old Ones were gone, having fled.

The Ancient Ones were not used to being denied, were not used to having to face resistance like the lemurs were putting up.

The Young Ones were prideful and wanted revenge.

Day after day the fight went on.

The Atrekna began to seed more Overminds, began to use vast slavespawn to burrow huge tentacles into the surface of the planet to extract minerals and other resources. Spawning pools required massive influxes of biomass as the Atrekna marched slavespawn out of them by the thousands, tens of thousands, by the millions. They had to grow more neural nodes for the Overmind and for every three they grew the lemurs destroyed two.

It was a war of attrition.

The Atrekna were forced to fall back on slowly growing the mossy ground covering, pushing it forward from around the spawning pools.

They were on the offensive, they were the attackers, but they had learned the hard way that in order to maintain their attack they had to defend their own areas or the lemurs swarmed in and dug in like ticks.

The lemurs started throwing smoke grenades at the Atrekna instead of opening fire with rockets and grenades. They threw smoke grenades at the larger combat slavespawn and ran off without doing anything else.

The worker slavespawn, responsible for maintaining the mass pools, the biogen lakes, and the multitude of biological systems started moving up to the Atrekna and the combat slavespawn, their antenna whipping.

The workers grabbed the Atrekna and the combat slavespawn, ignored all of their outcry and commands, and tossed them into the corrosive biomass reclaimator pools, then went back to work.

It took the Atrekna almost six hours to realize that the smoke contained the pheromone signals for "I have died and am decaying" that coated anything inside the cloud of smoke.

An Atrekna inspecting an Ohm Class slavespawn that refused to do anything but eat found that someone had snuck up on it and attached a psychic inhibitor on it, preventing it from receiving Atrekna commands.

A quick check showed that hundreds of the torpid Ohm Class had those stuck into the armor plating between their massive eyes, or lodged in their armor across the top armor.

The Atrekna realized that the rocket attacks had also dropped camouflaged psychic inhibitors all over the Ohm Class slavespawn.

Enraged, the Atrekna pushed at the lemur lines, forcing them back at great cost, but still forcing them back.

The Atrekna owned, or at least had driven the lemurs off of, nearly 65% of the land masses. The lemur oceanic fleet was in shambles, but those shambles had broken into small tasks forces that attacked any ocean going slavespawn, turning the oceans into a nightmare morass of bloated slavespawn corpses, burning ships, and hungry native creatures.

Those Atrekna assigned to the vast oceans often felt they were losing the war.

On the islands it wasn't much better. The combat was fierce and brutal, often point blank. The beaches were mined, heavy weapon emplacements were set up in rings, the lemurs were dug into cave systems. Atrekna vessels pounding the islands found themselves under attack form the rear or from lemur aerospace assets.

Temporal charges ensured that the slavespawn and Atrekna that made amphibious landings on the islands were the only Atrekna and slavespawn that could be involved in the fight unless they physically moved more reinforcements.

Within days the Atrekna on the islands realized that there was no getting off the island unless they killed all the lemurs.

The lemurs just seemed to want to kill the Atrekna.

The carnage was so intense that the Overmind ejected all the island fighting Atrekna from the Communal Mind.

Atrekna victories on the islands began to slowly take place.

The lemurs reached out of the grave, grabbed the victors, and whispered "there is room in this grave for you" right before the atomics went off.

Not a single islands was anything more than a sub-surface reef once the atomic blast cloud dissipated.

And still it got worse.

Make no mistake, the Atrekna were slowly winning, but it still got worse.

Air superiority once the lemurs ran out of strikers and aerospace assets didn't make it any better.

Unknown to the Atrekna, timers ran down.

-----

Naktrix moved up to Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd, a dozen lemur officers with him.

"My Lady?" the Telkan said softly.

Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd looked up from the holotank. She looked exhausted, her feeding tendrils limp, her mane unkempt and tangled, her eyes red rimmed and tired. "Yes, faithful one?"

"I'm sorry, Milady," the Telkan said softly.

One of the lemurs stepped forward and put a small device on Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd's side. It beeped twice as Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd blinked in confusion and looked at it.

She collapsed slowly, like she was deflating.

Her hurt, betrayed, and confused look made Naktrix's stomach clench.

"Be gentle with her. Load her," the Telkan said. He moved up to the holotank. "Tell her that it was an honor to be in her service."

"Aye!" the lemurs said.

They rolled Lady Fa'ahmya'ahd onto a stretcher and carried her out of the tent. One of the lemurs ran back and grabbed her satchel and her Orb of Contemplation.

Naktrix picked up the small device on the holotank rim.

-----

The Atrekna were shocked by the sudden assault.

All over the planet the lemurs streamed out of their hidey-holes, their fortifications, their emplacements, and charged the Atrekna lines, screaming their war cries and attacking fiercely, heedless of their rising casualties.

They climbed over their own dead.

They dragged themselves forward with one arm, the other arm holding in their intestines.

They fought on despite mortal wounds.

They laughed as they pulled the pin on a grenade when all hope was lost.

We can always take you with us seeped into the Overmind despite the Omnibrain's attempts to keep it out.

The Atrekna could see no reason for the attack. The lemurs had lost, didn't they know that?

The lemurs didn't seem to care, they just pressed the attack, heedless of stiffening Atrekna resistance as commanders got over their initial shock. Power armor pushed disabled tanks. Carefully shepherded aircraft came in on suicidal attack runs. Damaged robot combat armor stomped into the fight.

With screams of rage the lemurs scrambled from their trenchworks and advanced, firing, into the Atrekan lines.

Before the Atrekna could understand, could figure out a strategic or tactical reason for the lemurs sudden insane attack, something else happened.

The ground began to shake all over the planet, thousands of points. The Atrekna stared in shock as huge blocks of substance W drilled their way out of the crust. They activated their countergrav and streaked into the sky, vanishing within minutes.

All over the planet tens of thousands of "Shuttleblok Mk 1" shelters, devised on Telkan for this very scenario, lifted off and into the sky.

It was a testament to the men and women of the Terran Confederate Military Engineering Corps that not a single one failed to make orbit.

They all oriented, exchanged handshakes, and began pulling away from the planet.

-----

Naktrix looked at the female lemur soldier. She was wounded, missing an arm, her face was blistered from a near hit of bioacid. She was holding a pistol that was discolored and slightly damaged.

He could hear the fighting just outside the tents.

"It's time," he said.

"Aye," the lemur said.

He held up the trigger.

"One life," he said softly.

The tent was ripped away by a massive Dwellerspawn that screamed and shrieked.

Two lemurs were hacking at its legs with snarling cutting bars while a third was shooting the soft plates of its exposed belly with her rifle.

"One plot," the lemur said.

"Farm Yard Guard" they both said together.

He pressed the button.

The Atrekna were still locked in combat, still trying to repulse the desperate lemur attack, trying to break off so they could pursue the fleeing substance-w structures.

The lemurs attacked furiously, asking and giving no quarter.

The signal reached its destination.

-----

In orbit, aboard the station, the former Overseer watched on the screen as the blocks began vanishing into jumpspace.

The lemurs were all heading for the ship attached to the station that had been carefully repaired.

"We should go," the lemur next to her said.

"Someone should witness this," the Lanaktallan said softly. She reached out. "Can you hold my hand?"

The lemur took her hand, sitting next to her.

Together, they watched the screen.

Huge plumes of steam exploded from the oceans as the crust was ripped apart, exposing magma to the freezing cold water of the ocean floors.

The mountain ranges shuddered and dormant volcanoes blew their guts out. Where the volcanoes were extinct the ground exploded as the pressure cracked the continental plates.

Debris and ash filled the air and still more rents appeared in the crust.

A wall of superheated steam in front of a tsunami three hundred meters high moving at supersonic speeds hit the coast lines all around the protocontinent. The steam destroyed and killed for nearly five hundred miles inland. The water washed nearly three hundred miles, in some places nearly three thousand miles.

Ash and toxic gasses spewed into the air.

The sun was blocked out from the ash and debris.

Finally, the planet was nothing but reddish glows here and there and thick bands of ash laden clouds.

"It's over," the lemur said.

The Overseer nodded, wiping away a tear.

The lemur limped as he led her to the ship.

-----

It didn't matter that the sky was dark, the sun blotted away by the ash and debris.

It didn't matter that the volcanoes spewed radioactive ash and toxic gasses.

It didn't matter that the sea literally boiled in dozens of spots.

It didn't matter that the slavespawn that had survived had all gone berserk and reverted to primal instinct.

It didn't matter that snow was falling all over the planet. Black, gray, radioactive and ash laden snow.

It didn't matter that rivers were choked with mud and the bodies of dead slavespawn.

It didn't matter that the ruins of the cities were silent.

It didn't matter that time was mashed flat, hammered to the timestream with nails of raging insane fury.

All that mattered to the bare handful of Atrekna that had survived was that they had survived. They reached out for one another, coughing at the air full of fine ash.

It should have mattered to those Atrekna that they had survived more than just the bare fact that they, themselves, were alive.

As they slowly drifted through the snowing, ash filled landscape, they took stock of their numbers.

Less than a Conclave but more than a Quorum.

But none of them didn't realize what should have mattered to them.

As one passed a ground vehicle half hidden by the avalanche that had destroyed the abandoned vehicle column, they were too busy plotting with the others on how to bring the planet back to usable condition.

The missed the glowing red eyes staring at them in the darkness.

What had happened didn't matter.

The Atrekna had survived in small numbers.

So had more of the lemurs than the Atrekna would believe.

The Atrekna were the enemy as far as the lemurs were concerned.

It didn't matter that the temperature was dropping. That soon there would be no food. That the oceans would freeze over. That the planet was about to enter an ice age that would last for ten thousand years.

All that mattered to the surviving lemurs was that the Atrekna had survived.

That the Atrekna were the enemy.

And the enemy existed only to be destroyed.