First Contact

You think you have what it takes? Fine. Go to some abandoned world and pitch the ants. Prove it. Nobody cares about you, Lady. Hell, nobody even knows you exist! - Daxin the Liberator speaking to the Detainee beyond the Face of Crying Anne.

"Mistakes were made." - Carving on a wall

The system was a small one. It lay on the edge of the Long Dark and the Confederacy's Outer Rim Systems. It had a small yellow sun and four planetary bodies. Three of them were rocks, one was a gas giant. Not a large one, not a hypermassive, but just one that barely qualified to be a gas giant, orbited by several large asteroids and one captured comet. It had a layer of dust rings, nothing too impressive, mostly H20, C02, and CO. There was no asteroid belt. The inner-most planet was a dry barren rock with no atmosphere, tidally locked. The outer planet was a dead thing, any atmosphere had frozen away or been thrown into space as ejecta due to meteor strikes. The middle planet was firmly in the sweet zone.

That is the planet that concerns us.

The planet had two small moons, one an aggregation of debris that had welded into a singular mass over the millions of years. The other was a large captured asteroid that was fairly small but still inflicted tidal stresses on the planet.

The planet should have been the perfect place for life to bloom.

Ten times life bloomed and bad luck and stellar geography smashed it flat.

With only a single gas giant, debris from Oort Cloud and left-overs from the formation of the solar system were not cleared from the orbits.

Ten times life bloomed.

Ten times object floating through space wiped them out.

Three times life showed up and was murdered.

The first time, the life forms there, bipeds that relied on cooperation and harmony to lift themselves into civilization, had managed to build cities, master the atom, and start to put satellites in orbit.

A Doom Tube floated through the system and murdered the life forms and their civilization. They replaced virtually all the life with the twisted versions that the Doom Tubes always spawned on the surface of any life bearing planet they attacked.

When the Doom Tube floated on, the little world was completely infested with alien and hostile life.

That was all right. Their victory was short lived when a meteor wiped out anything more complex than a dandelion, an ant, and plankton after less than three thousand years of breeding. Odds were split and the results were that not a single Doom Tube organism or modified organism survived, just hardy native ones.

Twice more, in the ten times that debris from the Oort Cloud bypassed the single gas giant to slam against the planet, the planet was devastated.

That was OK with the planet. It just merrily spun through its orbit around the little sun, the magnetic field sparkling with twisting light.

The most recent native species to survive to intelligence had made it all the way to splitting the atom.

Then slaughtered each other in an orgy of mutual destruction that killed 90% of life on the planet.

One hundred thirty thousand years had gone by, so the craters were visible from orbit as perfectly round lakes and harbors, but even the background radiation from the weapons were gone.

Life had sprung back up. Plants, small animals, ocean dwelling creatures.

A handful of decades prior it had been surveyed by the Confederate Scout Corps, filed, and nearly forgotten about. Most of the easily accessible minerals on the planets were gone, there was no asteroid belt to mine, and the gas giant was little more than carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in various combinations. The only reason the value assessment wasn't right above an asteroid was the middle planet.

The little planet we're concerned with.

A few years later a major Omnicorp purchased the rights to the planet then established a small space station and a handful of research stations to watch the life forms. Not out of some great scientific discovery looming on the horizon, but more just curiosity. There were only a thousand or so researchers, most of them enjoying the long white beaches with the gentle surf, the primordial forests full of ferns and moss, and the rock climbing on the mountain ranges.

They pulled a bad card.

A Unified Military Council flotilla of a few hundred ships found the unarmed and undefended space station and research stations.

And blew them out of the universe.

But that was OK with the planet too. The malevolent universe thought it was funny too.

The whole flotilla ran face first into a more heavily defended star system less than a month later and were reduced to slowly expanding clouds of vapor and debris.

The majority of the life forms survived, even if the visitors didn't, and as far as injuries went, well, the little planet had taken worse.

Plus, it had a new orbital body! Sure, it was artificial, open to space, but it was larger than the smaller moon. It even sparkled and glittered!

A war nowhere else but everywhere happened, and the stellar system went on the market and was purchased within a dozen nanoseconds as eVI programs executed their instructions to purchase, sell, purchase, sell, and repeat hundreds of times with a few seconds.

Then another visitor arrived in a space ship.

The ship was old, despite the fact that it was on its maiden voyage. It moved around the star system, almost at random, orbited the star for a bit, then moved out to the gas giant where it dropped a few things off, then came back.

The ship docked at the dead station for a week or two.

The planet didn't worry.

The ship left the station and dropped down into the atmosphere. The pilot was not very skilled and the ship's VI did its best, but the ship still left a sooty streak across the sky.

But it landed intact.

[The Universe Liked That]

The creature that came out of the ship was interesting to the planet, but not too interesting. Bipedal, predatory eye set, heavy dense bones of air space strengthened calcium, unidirectional muscle, sensitive to a nice little span of light, air pressure changes, and other things.

The planet lost interest quickly.

There was just one.

The biped, a female, tossed a ball down on the ground, near the spaceship, and went over to sit on a rock outcropping from the sheer rocky ridge. It lit a smokestick and opened a drink. It watched as the ship was dissolved, vanishing into the ground. It used a palm mounted holoemitter to lay plans.

The ridge was part of a mountain range that predated life itself on the planet. The mountains had worn down to only a few thousand feet tall. A quirk of tectonic activity had made it so that the older rock, subjected to intense heat and pressure to the extent that it changed the rock's characteristics, was pushed so that it overlaid the more recent rock that contained coal, limestone, even fossils. The rivers that flowed through the mountains were older than the mountains themselves, laid down when no life crawled on the planet. The hard mountains had been worn down by weather, gravity, time, glaciers, and a few attempts at mining the vast mineral resources.

But where the biped sat, day after day, interacting with the curious life forms that approached her, there were no easily accessible or reachable resources.

Still, she sat there. Sleeping underneath a cloth. Eating from a small can that seemed to refill through magic, drinking water from another container. The small, fluffy, curious little creatures with big eyes and ears that ate the plants liked to cuddle up to her at night, sharing their warmth. They would purr softly as she stroked them.

The female often sat with one on her lap, petting it gently, as she stared at the holoemitter's projection above her palm.

Eventually, a concealed, camouflaged door opened in the rock of the ridge.

The biped went inside.

The door closed.

Inside the mountain a facility was built by tiny things, a dusting of an atoms wide each.

To the planet, it tickled.

Corridors were created, reaching deep into the mountains, to where caves and tunnels existed that had never had life touch them. Dry, empty caverns had huge tanks created in them, attached by vast pipes to strange machinery. The machinery turned on and a frozen slurry of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen filled the tanks. The tunnels had walls built within them. The walls were supported by heavy springs, designed to keep the corridors stable even if the ground shook with a magnitude more than 8.5 on an ancient scale.

The female came out often to pet the small creatures.

The facility was largely building itself.

As vast engines and forges were created, the speed at which the facility was built increased.

She sat on the rock, holding a few of the fluffy creatures, petting them, as she smoked her smoke sticks, drank from bottles, and ate meals that she sometimes gave the fluffy creatures little bites of.

Spring moved to summer before the facility was finished. Then summer moved to fall as the equipment was built by automation. A data connection was made to the galactic network, but one hidden, dispersed, and carefully concealed to ensure the origin of the data requests and the end point of the data receipts was always hidden.

It was a blustery day with a light rain when the lights came on and the woman sitting on the rock went inside. The curious fluffy animals followed her. She led them through the facility until they came to a wondrous place where it was like summer.

There they played as the woman set to work.

She worked alone, a few eVI's here, a few VI's there.

She visited the little fluffy creatures, holding them and petting them, feeding them treats, as she sat and stared off into space, her brain whirring and clicking through the topics she was studying.

Science that did the impossible. Theorems that addressed things that were based upon things that seemed like madness. Proofs that described the foundations of reality and the universe itself.

She tested, experimented, and redid experiments that proved theorems and proofs thousands of years old. She explored ancient dead ends. She examined failed theories and false proofs.

A modern school teacher would have watched with approval as she sped through the very experiments they would have assigned classes. Often repeating them more than necessary, using the scientific method to ensure that not only she understood it but could replicate it.

Months went by as she dwelled nearly alone in her vast redoubt.

[The Universe Liked That]

The ships arrived with a shadow and tendrils of smokey energy.

A whisper of You belong to us preceded them.

They seeded the gas giant. They seeded the outer planet. They seeded the inner planet. They built a vast machine around the yellow sun. They found the space station and warped it, twisted it, until the space station was the skeleton of an obscene living creature. They landed upon the middle planet. They began to pull forward shadows of the ancient past.

The sun began to turn red.

The system sunk down.

[The Universe Disliked That]

Slavespawn were replicated from the species that had evolved from the ones that had attacked the planet from the Doom Tube. Creatures wiped out by warfare and the Doom Tube were brought forward and packed into feeding camps.

Cities of crystal and dark rock were raised.

More and more of the invaders spread across the planet, their huge bone white eyes gazing with infinite superiority over the land and the twisted ecosystem they had built.

The little fluffy things were extinct, wiped out by the voracious appetites of the slavespawn and the cruel appetites of the invaders. They were all gone, except those in the wondrous cavern of endless warm sunny days.

The invaders, mauve of skin and thick with phasic power, were unaware of what dwelled beneath the mountain ridge. What dwelled in caverns and tunnels of silent rock that predated even microbial life.

The being that dwelled below the mountains watched in sneering contempt as the invaders destroyed the ecology, temporally shifted life forms, and altered the planet in a vast xenoforming project.

Time in the system began moving faster relative to the rest of the universe as the system sunk further.

[The Universe Disliked That]

Here and there slavespawn came up missing, or were found destroyed. Servitors came up missing.

The invaders were unconcerned. Slavespawn often fought one another and servitors often tried to escape, as if they could escape the planet.

Then there was a gravitational distortion. From the distortion came strange robotic attackers. Many of them were tentacles surrounding a central hub, some were bipedal, some were quadruped.

All of them were function over form.

Battlesteel and endosteel robots fought against the servitors and slavespawn.

Some of the Old Ones saw glimmers of Inheritor military tactics, but their warnings were cast aside.

Finally, the attackers were forced to reveal themselves.

Large, bulky neural tissue in tanks, with eyes and floating jawbones, in heavy combat machines. All of the commands to the robots emanated from those great creatures that had left behind their physical bodies to be neural tissue in robotic bodies.

The fight was tough. The tissue was almost immune to phasic attacks.

But at last they were destroyed.

One gave out a datasqueal, aimed at the night sky.

The invaders watched carefully.

Nothing happened.

The invaders relaxed.

Another gravitational anomaly heralded the return of the attacking cyborgs and their robotic minions. Their tactics were more effective, more tailored against the slavespawn and servitors.

Once the large brains in several tanks were destroyed, the robots all self-destructed.

The invaders stood victorious again.

An Old One examined the neural tissue closely.

It was servitor tissue. Modified somehow, but still servitor neural tissue.

Another anomaly. Another battle. This time there was five times the command units. The battle raged for nearly two years. A city was destroyed. An atomic blast ended the fight when the largest one was destroyed.

Silence settled on the world.

The servitors became suspicious of every anomaly. The Ancient Ones were convinced it was an Inheritor trick. The Old Ones cautioned wariness, that these attacks were different from anything ever seen, it could be an invader from another dimension. The Young Ones insisted it was some kind of time traveling attack by the servitor species that had wiped itself out with atomic weapons.

They were all wrong.

It was much worse.

Gunmetal eyes stared with molten hate through cigarette smoke as gentle hands stroked the nearly extinct fluffy creatures. The other hand played with a cruel knife, spinning it on the palm, making it dance between the fingers, vanishing and reappearing up the sleeve.

A small gravitic anomaly appeared on the surface, by one of the white shorelines where huge plant stalks pulled ocean water deeper inland to cool and feed slavespawn.

Slavespawn and servitors rushing there to repel a robotic attack found only a dead over-brain, the brain reduced to jelly that leaked from cracks in the casing, the robotics all smashed.

Even though it was heavily damaged, it was the most intact one the invaders had heard of.

A dozen invaders went to the wreck, hoping to wrest from the wreckage the secrets of where it originated from.

The gravitic anomaly surged, pulsed, and collapsed.

The invaders vanished.

Worse, the wreckage vanished too.

The invaders put guards at the place and went on with their own machinations, assuming the invaders that scouted the anomaly were dead.

The invaders wished they were.

[The Universe Liked That]

Before the twelve Atrekna even woke from the unshielded mat-trans, robots grabbed them, dragged them to separate cells, ripped off their clothing, and tossed them to the floor half-conscious.

The cells had lights that flashed with various intensity at various times. The temperature fluctuated wildly, without any seeming pattern. Water sprayed from the ceiling or walls, at different force, different temperature, at random. Loud howling, screeching sounds echoed through the cells, the volume moving up and down at random.

Servitor neural tissue, spoiled and almost rotten, vat-grown without anything more than bare stimulation ever experienced, was dropped in the cells.

The Atrekna had no choice but to eat the terrible tasting tissue.

When they could, they lashed out with their phasic powers.

It did no good.

Finally, one Atrekna was removed from the cells. Roughly handled by robots. It was pushed into a chamber that was quiet. The chamber began to hum. The Atrekna passed out. It awoke in a chamber that looked much the same, except the walls were slightly different color.

The Atrekna was pulled from the room by a robot that took it to a room and strapped to the first table in a row of twelve. The Atrekna struggled, but it was no match for the endosteel robot that was little more than a box on treads with tentacle arms and four-plate pincher manipulators.

The Atrekna watched as its companions were all taken to the room, strapped to the table. A phasonium band, adorned with crystals, was attached to their heads, closing their third eye.

The robots all withdrew.

The Atrekna found they could communicate with one another, but they could tell they were inside some kind of bubble that prevented their formidable phasic powers from reaching beyond the white room. The room was tiled with white tile affixed by white grout. The floor was white tile. The ceiling was white tile. The pipes and tubes in the room were wrapped with white insulation or painted white. The light came from nowhere, ambient light but not using phasic power, the light a soft white. The only thing that was not white was a circle on one wall that had three hands on it. One ticked for every second, the others moved slowly.

A kind of time keeping device. Crude and primitive. Gears and springs rather than phasic crystalline structures keeping time via atomic decay.

As one they all agreed, the creatures behind the attackers was finally going to show themselves.

They would wait, work together, overpower whatever it was, and escape if they could not dominate it and turn its vast resources to their own ends.

Hours ticked by.

They began to get thirsty.

They began to get hungry.

Their muscles, long atrophied and weak, began to cramp from being held in the same position.

They went silent.

Time slowly went by.

After a long period of silence broken only by the steady click from the time keeping device. One click per second. One click per sixty seconds.

Click.

Click.

Click.

There was a hissing sound and all twelve Atrekna turned to look at the far wall. A thin rectangle outline appeared, then a door pulled to the side. Steam billowed from the doorway, pouring into the room.

The Atrekna all stared as a biped moved from the steam. It lifted its hands to its mouth and lit a stick it held between its lips. It lowered its hands and exhaled smoke.

It had gunmetal gray eyes.

The Atrekna all stared at the fact that the lemur was naked.

Two of the Young Ones had seen Inheritors before.

One of the Ancient Ones had seen a creature like this before.

It screamed.

"LEMUR!" it screamed out loud and with its telepathic powers.

All twelve saw the lemur's mouth widen in a predatory baring of teeth, even as it exhaled more smoke. It strode into the room, unconcerned with its nakedness. It stopped and made a motion.

The beds whirred as they tilted until the Atrekna were upright.

Attempts at phasic attacks were met with pain as electricity crackled from the phasonium bands around their heads, covering their third eye.

The lemur just stood there, exhaling smoke, staring with those cold eyes.

"You couldn't leave well enough alone," it suddenly snarled.

The Atrekna realized they could understand its speech.

"You couldn't just leave me to my research. You couldn't just leave me to live my life," the lemur's voice was growing colder, harder, even as she began to exude malevolence and hatred.

One of the Young Ones thrashed slightly as its eyes became bloodshot.

"I was fine here. I was happy here," the lemur said, her voice low, sultry, soft.

Another Young One squealed as the hatred began hammering at its brain.

"I'd seen a way to improve my life's work. To improve upon my magnum opus. A way to improve life for every sentient being in the universe," she said softly, turning and walking back and forth as she spoke. Even her mental voice was a low, sibilant whisper, sultry and soft.

An Ancient One gurgled with pain as the hatred and wrath pouring off of her made its eyes go bloodshot.

"Hundreds of millions of stars, tens of millions of stellar systems, millions of planets you could have gone to in order to play your little game," the female lemur said.

She reached out with one bare foot and pressed her toes against a floor tile.

It slid back and a pedestal raised up.

One of the Ancient Ones recognized the steel implements on the cloth covered top for what they were.

Surgical instruments.

It started screaming.

"But you had to come here," the lemur said softly, her gunmetal gray eyes liquid iron as she swept her terrible gaze over the immobilized and screaming Atrekna. She picked up a long bladed knife then slowly turned to face the Atrekna.

She inhaled through the tube, which several recognized as a Treana'ad smoke stick, and exhaled the chemical laden smoke.

"You'll regret that. Regret bothering me. Regret interfering in my work," the lemur said, walking toward the screaming Atrekna, her hips swaying. She leaned forward and blew smoke across its screaming face.

"Your entire fucking species will regret it by the time I'm done," she said softly.

She lifted up the blade.

"We'll start with the screaming part."