DRONE TASKS 100% COMPLETE

RECALLING DRONES

DRONES RECALLED

INITIATING TERTIARY REACTOR TEST

REACTIONS PASSED

INITIALIZE TERTIARY REACTORS 6-11

REACTORS ONLINE

SYSTEMS CHECK

PRIMARY COMPUTER SYSTEMS - CHECK

SECONDARY COMPUTER SYSTEMS - CHECK

TERTIARY COMPUTER SYSTEMS - CHECK

AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS - CHECK

WEAPON SYSTEMS CHECK

ALL WEAPON SYSTEMS AT 100%

DEFENSE SYSTEMS CHECK

ALL DEFENSIVE SYSTEMS AT 100%

REFIT COMPLETE

SENDING AUTONOMOUS SYSTEM INITIALIZATION PULSE

PULSE RECEIVED

AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS ONLINE

RELEASING PHYSICAL INTERLOCKS

RELEASING SOFTWARE INTERLOCKS

RELEASING PHYSICAL RESTRAINT SYSTEMS

RELEASED

ALL SYSTEMS READY

TASK FINISHED

STEAM BOAT WILLYREADY

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

The Atrekna had argued and researched long and hard to discover the secrets of the Feral Species in the New Universe. They had even gone as far as to summon the one who had self-designated itself as Dalvanak, whom they called the Maddened One. Dalvanak had arrived dressed in finery, carrying his Mad Lemur sidearm, surrounded by glass globes full of dirt and primitive insects that slowly orbited him, carried by his psychic powers. Dalvanak had answered questions until one of the Ancient Ones had attempted to chastise Dalvanak for his choice in attire.

Dalvanak had used his psychic powers in a horrible fashion, combining it with his research on the Mad Lemurs. Dalvanak had hurled a glass globe full of simple dirt and tiny red and black insects at the Ancient One, then lashed out with his power, shattering the globe. The tiny insects, all standard insect appearance and barely much larger than the tip of a blade, had covered the Ancient One as the dirt had showered over the powerful ancient being.

The Ancient One had mentally sneered and begun brushing the dirt off itself.

It sneer turned to a grimace. Its grimace into a twisted expression of pain.

It began to scream as the tiny red insects, red bodied with a black abdomen, began biting all over it. The pain was so intense it disrupted the Ancient One's concentration and it plummeted to the ground, landing with a wet splat as its body ruptured from the force of the freefall impact.

Dalvanak had stared at the gathered Atrekna as he used his psychic power to gather back up the soil and the tiny insects, as well as one of the Ancient One's eyes, and imprisoned the terrible creatures inside another glass globe.

Dalvanak had then left.

But the data he had provided in his madness had helped the Atrekna plan.

The allies of the vanished Lemurs were attacking on all fronts. Every time the Atrekna sunk a system into the temporal seas, the Lemurs or their allies were there. They attacked without fear, without hesitation, and had recently chosen to cause the stellar mass to explode rather than cede the systems to the Atrekna.

The Atrekna needed new resources, new methods, new ways of attack and defense.

Dalvanak the Maddened One, with his burning red eyes, had provided data as well as solution.

Use the gravitational imprint of the stellar mass to throw a shadow across jumpspace and that barely discovered and researched area the lemurs called 'hyperspace' as well as interdict Hellspace.

The Atrekna prepared.

Some watched the progress of the Death Bringer on the Primary System, watched it slowly rip and tear its way through defenders and facilities both.

The Atrekna did not have much time to seize another Prime System before the last bastion would fall to the Death Bringer and its terrible weapons.

A target was chosen. On the edge of the ancient Herd Species systems, now largely in the possession of the Great Harvesters, a system was connected to nearly a thousand others. It had living occupants, which would be necessary to bring war machines to full capacity, as well as grown new Atrekna who were more accustomed to the New Universe.

The system was perfect.

Too far away from the Herd Lord's current occupied systems, too far away from the Ferals of the Pact of Madness. Populated. Rich in resources. Four slavespawn habitats had passed by that were still accessible.

The Atrekna selected their most ancient autonomous war machines. Ones that even possessed rudimentary personalities that were large enough to harvest an entire planet. They selected vast Hive Ships and Swarm Ships. They selected nearly a thousand Atrekna, almost a third of them experienced at fighting against the Pact of Madness.

They set their eyes on the system.

It took a great effort, but they moved everything there at once in a shower of exploding chronotrons that were visible, with the right instrumentation, a half-million light years away.

The universe howled with laughter.

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

The stellar system was an anomaly.

It had survived the First Precursor War largely untouched. The fourth planet had taken a mass driver hit that had destroyed the civilization, but that had allowed a small lizard to claw its way to dominance in the intervening millions of years. Other than that, the system hardly had anything to do with the three races all slaughtering each other.

It had been sighted by the Lanaktallan when the lizard people had sent out a few signals of "Hi! We're Here!" but it was too far away to bother with at the time. The Lanaktallan had even ignored the slowship expansion that had allowed the lizard people to take three other systems.

When the lizard people had developed jump drive and encountered the Lanaktallan, they'd immediately seen the benefits of the Unified Civilized Council and joined up.

Nearly a thousand years had gone by before the lizard people began to suspect that there were sinister elements within the Unified Council that may not have had their people's best interest at heart. They had carefully began examining their population metrics and their people and had noticed a slow decline in birth rates, just like every other species, as well as a drop in intellect.

They had been on the edge of accusing the Unified Council of biological manipulation when the Mad Lemurs of Terra and the Lanaktallan, the silly, slow to act, and somewhat dim Lanaktallan, had both leaped at each other with fangs bared and gone fully bug nuts crazy on each other.

The lizard people, who called themselves Phrewickens, had reacted to the tempest of howling violence around them by wiping the blood and gore off their face, getting in their car, and driving home.

If the Lankies and the Lemurs wanted to kill each other, that sounded like they were mammals, with mammal problems, and a mammalian problem didn't involve any sensible Phrewickens.

The Phrenwickens had long believed that keeping out of other people's fights was usually a good idea.

They had not ejected the members of the Unified Civilized Council, instead had reminded them that the Phrewickens considered them citizens and the Phrewicken government had sought to calm the citizenry.

Then the lemurs had all fallen down dead, the Council had surrendered to a giant mantis, and the Phrewickens had breathed a sigh of relief.

The war was over, and they had nothing to worry about.

Then word had come of another species attacking. Something about a long dead race coming back and attacking across the base of the galactic arm spur.

Once again, that sounded like a mammalian problem to the Phrewickens.

Elderly Phrewickens sipped their drinks and shook their heads at how the warm blooded always seemed to be jumping on each other with knives.

Which is why they missed the flicker along the corona of their primary star.

They knew that if they just minded their own business and treated everyone with politeness, nothing would happen to them.

Which is how they missed a slight red-shift in the starry night sky.

The Phrewickens firmly believed that once it all settled down, things would go right back to how they had always been. The slow march of history for the existence of a species.

Which is how they missed the slight 'hiss' picked up by jumpspace and how no ships arrived for nearly a month.

After all, the Confederacy was on the other side of the Great Gulf, the distance was too great for them to bother to try to wrap the former Council systems into their own government. So there was no need to really worry.

Which is why they were completely startled when the sun suddenly began to dim rapidly, going from an energetic yellow star to a baleful orange orb within a week.

The Oort Cloud seemed to reflect scans as if it was suddenly solid.

Craft that attempted to go to jumpspace either exploded or went nowhere. The luckiest just had their engines explode.

Then the vast ships appeared.

Precursor Autonomous War Machines, the new Type-IV versions, came in via Hellspace transfers. Dozens of them, the size of small continents and hundreds of kilometers thick.

Phrewickens System Defense ships were swept aside like so much chaff before the whirlwind.

Then the massive spiraled shells and twisted forms, throbbing obscene life, was spotted as it wavered like a heat mirage and appeared, immediately shedding smaller versions that oriented and then sped toward the other fifteen planetary bodies.

As the PAWM and the Dwellerspawn approached the two asteroid belts, they spawned more of themselves to dart toward the scattered resources slowly orbiting the stellar mass, intending on scooping up the debris of the two failed planetary bodies.

The people of Phrewicken huddled down, terrified of what they knew was to come.

The first PAWM vessels landed forces on the three moons, assaulting the facilities there.

The screaming and pleading only lasted a few hours.

The others scooped up the infrastructure in orbit. Those that could boarded lifeboats and escape pods and jettisoned toward the surface, desperate to stave off the doom they could plainly see.

Orbit went silent before the lunar facilities.

Each planetary body had twenty, thirty, sometimes forty of the massive ships in orbit, far enough away to not effect the planet with tidal effects, close enough to launch parasite craft.

Others moved in-system, orbiting and scanning the stellar mass.

The people of Phrewicken had no way to see the dozens of spacescraft made of crystalline and bio-engineered flesh appear in the system. Most of them headed toward the stellar mass, cruising forward inside of a nimbus of purplish-blue phasic energy. Small groups went toward each planetary body, each gas giant, while a score moved to the sole inhabited planet.

The people on the planet, hiding under tables, in basements, huddled in shelters, running screaming through the streets, or just curled up and shivering, all heard it at the same time.

YOU BELONG TO US!

Many people, of many species, jumped up and ran, screaming, as their minds filled with the horror of what was to come.

The Atrekna had arrived in force.

But they were not done.

At selected points, slight twists in space-time generated by the now-adjusted stellar mass, a dozen Atrekna ships met and adjusted their position with careful precision. Phasic power, amplified and enhanced by massive crystals, lanced out and met, flaring in space.

Gates opened one by one, each one a shimmering orb showing another stellar system. As each one opened, more PAWM, Dwellerspawn, and Atrekna ships appeared in the far reaches of the system, wavering into existence like a mirage becoming solid.

Atrekna ships, autonomous war machines, and Dwellerspawn moved through the bubbles, vanishing from Phrewicken and arriving in thirty other systems as the Atrekna carried out a series of lighting attacks, each attacking enabling them to jump to a new system.

Within the span of a single day, they had established a presence on nearly five hundred stellar systems, each 'spoke' consisting of three worlds from the Phrewichen System. The spokes prevented access to the system from any of the normal methods of superluminal travel, turning the Phrewichen System into a walled fortress.

Only the outer 'ring' could be assaulted, and only from Hellspace.

The Atrekna had determined that the Pact of Madness could only defend so many worlds at once, could only counter-attack so fast.

They would not be denied.

This universe was theirs.

And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

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

Five days passed, and still the Atrekna had not made planetfall on the inhabited planets of the system, waiting until they had sufficient reinforcements to make it extremely difficult to dislodge the Atrekna forces.

They too had learned during the long brutal war on Hesstla.

They had increased their preferred assault force numbers by a factor of ten.

They had tripled the amount of Atrekna to control each planet.

They set about securing the stellar system first.

The planet was not going anywhere.

Five days, and the signal was sent up and down the 'spokes' through the shimmering bubbles that connected each system to the others.

With a spray of chronotrons, the stellar masses dimmed and began 'sinking' into the fabric of the universe.

In the Phrewichen System, an anomaly occurred.

Space time became stressed, and tore slightly. Normally it was not a problem. The tears even occurred naturally at times as the universe expanded.

A bubble of dark matter welled up, a phenomena the Atrekna had seen before. They knew that the bubble would spread out and eventually 'seal' the tear in the fabric of reality. It was a strange event, to be sure, and one they had never witnessed in their own universe, but they had finally come to accept that the rules of the New Universe were different in strange ways.

Still, the Atrekna had learned, at great cost, to be careful, so they sent a single autonomous war machine, the size of a small continent, to examine the bubble of strange protomatter.

It was transparent to most scanners, invisible, but at the same time exerting faint gravitational force and it obscured whatever might be inside of it. Some researchers believed that what was inside it was wholly contained in a type of bubble universe that would slowly expand out into the universe to 'repair' the tear. Others believed that the hidden stellar systems were just concealed by the strange protomatter that dark matter was often made up of.

The great ship moved close and scanned the dark matter.

----------

The ship was massive. Three hundred kilometers long. Fifty kilometer thick. Its lines were efficient, brutal, and fearsome. It drifted, immeasurably far yet dangerously close to its siblings, silent and still in the strange violet and purple light that was emanated from nowhere and everywhere.

SCAN DETECTED

TYPE-IV AUTONOMOUS WAR MACHINE

INITIALIZE SYSTEM WAKEUP

The engines began to slowly light with a dark and terrible purpose.

--------

The massive autonomous war machine detected the slight shiver in the dark matter. As it scanned, the bubble, the droplet, suddenly thinned and spread out, becoming an irregularly edged disk only a few hundred kilometers thick and nearly five thousand kilometers in diameter.

The autonomous war machine sent out an alert at the strange activity of the dark matter.

The dark matter suddenly bulged on one side, stretching out as clumps of dark matter sprayed away from the bulge, evaporating into realspace as if it couldn't exist separated from the main mass.

The signal was still six seconds from the nearest Atrekna crewed vessel when the leading edge of the bulge ruptured, spraying dark matter.

A massive ship's hull tore free of the dark matter, the superstructure of the ship lunging up out of the flattened disk of dark matter until nearly a third was free. It 'fell' down toward the dark matter, slamming into it and causing a massive wave to spray away from each side of the hull, even as the rear of the ship broke free of the surface of the bubble in a blinding spray of dark matter.

The autonomous war machine felt dozens of computing lobes fuse as it tried to determine how it was possible for the impossible and ridiculous to occur.

The signal reached the Atrekna ships at the same time as the great ship gave a roar heard throughout the entire stellar system.

STEAMBOAT WILLY IS HERE!

---------

She stood on the show bridge of the massive battle wagon. A teenager again, her hair flowing around her, a headset covering her ears with the band hidden by her wide brimmed captain's dress hat. She wore running shoes tied with a bow, mid-thigh tights slightly too tight that left a slight bulge of flesh over the top of the tights, a short dark blue pleated skirt with a thin line of white around the bottom edge, and a white shirt with a dark blue vest, the sleeves of the shirt only covering her shoulders and poofy.

She held a baton in one hand that she pointed at the autonomous war machine.

She had been Born Whole, with memories of who she had been fused with the knowledge of thousands of years of warfare. Not just knowledge, knowledge by itself was worthless to her. She knew how to use the knowledge just as she remembered who she had been before she had been Born Whole.

"OPEN FIRE!" Admiral Thennis roared.