The Eosians...

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

In the meantime, the Eosians had not been idle. They knew that their
problems were not over, even though the pressure had been greatly
eased by the sudden, unexpected outbreak of civil warfare among their
foes. They worked at an incredible pace, on the remaining worlds that
still retained contact with each other, to prepare for the future
assaults they knew would sooner or later come, and to look for some
way, any way, of going on the offensive.

Along with those projects, a side project was initiated that would
have considerable effects on the future. Realizing that being
overwhelmed was still a distinct medium-term prospect, some of the
leaders of the remnant of the Hegemony began pondering how they could
possibly establish 'emergency settlements' elsewhere, ideally unknown
to the Beasties and far beyond any likely range of immediate
discovery.

This group included a motley group of military men, politicians,
scientists, academics, and others. Their project was a low priority,
and opposed by many in the leadership, because they opposed the
inevitable diversion of resources and effort that their project would
require. It would not require very much such diversion, but every bit
mattered.

Still, some of the members of the ad hoc group were well-connected and
influential, and they had some sound arguments to present, and they
had an unknown ally as well. [1]

In the end, they were able to convince enough 'power players' to go
along with their idea to begin putting it into practice. It took
years to complete even the minimum necessary planning and preparation,
and more time to actually arrange recruitment and supply and
construction. Only a fraction of the resources remaining to the
Hegemony could be spared for the effort.

The result of this planning and effort was the construction of a
collection of starships, on various of the remaining Hegemonic worlds.
Extreme secrecy had to be observed, because the leakage of the
purpose of these ships and the project would have defeated its
purpose. In the end, 50 ships were built, a few in the construction
yards of Eosia itself, others on scattered other planets. Usually,
the ships were disguised as military production, and even the
personnel who worked to build them rarely had any idea of their real
purpose.

The ships were unusual in design, being both larger and less heavily
armed than most military vessels. They were in fact specially
designed to be useful as colonial ships, able to establish a viable
colony by themselves, without additional support from the
homeworlds. They were also designed to be able to travel much further
without support than most Hegemony ships, so they could establish safe
settlements far from the danger zone. They were in their way
masterworks, since their designers tried their best to make them the
best they could, since they might be the last hope of their society.

The trickiest part of the entire operation was recruitment. They
were, after all, recruiting men and women who had to be willing to
permanently leave their homeworlds and society behind, to do so in
complete secrecy from even their nearest and dearest, and they had to
be tremendously motivated and skilled, since a relatively small number
of people would have to be able to fulfill a huge variety of tasks.
They had to be reliable, self-starting, and able to work well both in
teams and as individuals.

It took some time to select these people, and to recruit them in
secrecy. But the task was managed, and more easily than the team
leaders had initially expected. [2] [3]

It was 31,148 when the project approached the point that they were
ready to actually begin launching their secret expeditions. The new
ships, the Colonizers, were fueled, staffed, and ready, and their
crews had been aboard them along with their supplies and equipment for
months. The ships were incommunicado, for the sake of secrecy. Even
the personnel of the spacedocks where the ships waited had little idea
of their purpose, thinking them just one more military project among
many.

The Colonizers began their epic voyages on what Terrans would call
April 19th, 31,148 BC. They did not all leave at the same time,
instead heading out individually on their assigned courses. None of
them arrived at the destinations listed in their filed flight plans,
since those were faked, and the leaders of the project arranged from
their failure to show up to be 'lost' in the bureaucratic machinery
under various excuses. [4]

The project leadership then proceeded to destroy all but one set of
written records about the nature and purpose of the Colonizers, which
was locked away in a highly secre vault on Ashtra. The only other
record of these ships and their real purpose was maintained orally,
and in the data files of ARNETHIS. [5]

One thing not even ARNETHIS or the project leaders knew was the
ultimate destinations of the Colonizers. This was part of the plan.
Once they were safely away, the Colonizers would select their own
courses out into unexplored space, following the decisions of their
captains and colonial leaders. The reasoning went that if the project
leaders themselves did not know where the ships were going, they could
not leak the information.

The Colonizers were a gamble, an insurance policy based on 50 launches
in the dark, and into the unknown. After the Colonizers were all
launched, the endless war effort continued on the part of the
Hegemony. The entire Colonizer project soaked up only a tiny amount
of the resources of the Hegemony, a tiny side-effort. [6]

Though the Colonizers would have little effect on the war effort of
the Hegemony, they would have considerable effects on future history,
touching on that of Terra. But that would come later. In the
meantime, it would prove that the Colonizers had gotten out 'just in
time', because not long after the last of the Colonizers vanished into
the unknown, Koalidi made his next move. About that...

MORE LATER.


[1] The unknown ally was ARNETHIS, the still-secret AI that had been
accidentally created in the heart of the Hegemony's master computer
network on Ashtra. ARNETHIS had concluded that creating hidden
colonies was likely to be necessary, and was working in secrecy to
help bring about that goal.

[2] Here, having ARNETHIS as a secret ally proved especially useful to
the team, with the AI's access to the vast data files of the Hegemony
and the planetary governments. Still, the work was much harder and
more complex than this account makes it sound, involving
spirit-breaking hard work and effort by a number of people over a
course of many Terran years.

[3] Unfortunately, not every recruit was strictly voluntary. This was
not known to most of the leaders of the project, but a few people
ended up aboard the Colonizer Class ships that had no wish to be
there, and who should not, strictly speaking, have been there. This
would later cause much trouble.

[4] With multi-cornered hot warfare going on, it wasn't hard to
misfile the destination and fate of 50 starships, especially with a
little secret help from ARNETHIS.

[5] Check back.

[6] Still, there had been considerable resistance and controversy over
sending out that much orichalcum on such a gamble. It was not much in
absolute terms, but orichalcum was precious beyond belief in that
ongoing war, and tons of it went out with the Colonizers.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Koalidi's frustration drove him with the same psychotic intensity that
had originally led him to the creation of the Beasties, and to his
transformation of himself into one. In tandem with the vast intellect
of the MasterWyrm (the first and greatest of the broodwyrms), he
strove to find a way to solve the tiny but disastrous flaw in his
Beasties. Finally, his own genius, applied to the genetics of his
creations, amplified by the MasterWyrm's cognitive ability, did find
a solution of sorts.

Koalidi knew that if he created New Beasties lacking the flaw, even
his remaining loyal Beasties would be unable to coexist with them.
That ruled out simply growing New Beasties in the bionodes of the
broodwyrms. But, Koalidi realized, if he could somehow arrange for
the flawed Old Beasties to begin producing New Beasties themselves, by
natural reproduction, he could gradually phase the old type out, and
slowly produce an army of New Beasties, with which he could restart
his project.

He and the MasterWyrm calculated that they could create a virus, an
artificial virus, and use it as a vector to carry the corrected
genetic code and implant it in the germ plasm of the extant Beasties.
They themselves would not be affected, but afterward their offspring
and later-generation descendents would be New Beasties, lacking the
fatal flaw of the original batch. [1]

But this would not happen rapidly. It would take time for the virus
to spread through enough of the populations of the current Beasties to
be useful, it would take time for the New Beastie population to grow,
since it would have to be done slowly enough not to trigger a
reflexive purge by the Old Beasties, there would inevitably be
setbacks and unforeseen problems.

Koalidi would have been prepared to accept that delay, except for the
problem of the remaining Homosentients. There were several groups of
worlds still resisting the riven Beastie hordes, and the core of
worlds around the Eos System were still holding on, and indeed were
regaining strength with the respite the Beastie civil wars had given
them. Koalidi himself did not know exactly how many Homosentient
power centers remained, because intelligence had broken down when the
Beastie unity had been broken.

Koalidi had another headache, also. In spite of all efforts, against
all odds, somehow the Homosentient resistance on Maladara itself
remained in existence. Indeed, they had managed to remain a constant
nuisance. As their numbers shrank, their individual deadliness rose,
and they became incredibly expert at identifying the slightest
weakness and taking advantage of it.

Also, they had discovered ways to take the occasional psion among
them, and use those powers with deadly effectiveness. They had even
managed to make technological breakthroughs in secret, hidden
laboratories, creating various weapons and devices, and drawing on the
same biotechnical knowledge Kaolidi had used to create the Beasties to
create psionic symbiote organisms that could amplify and extend
psionic power in phenomenal ways.

Psionics proved to be especially effective against the Beasties
because, except for their personal telepathy that they used for
communication, they had no psionic powers whatever (or most of them
did not). Koalidi and his techs had known enough about psionic
physics and application to design in limited telepathy, but no more.

Against Homosentient psions with varied and strong psionic Powers, the
Beasties often found themselves horribly overmatched without
overwhelming numbers. A squad of well-trained and capable psions was
often a match for a battalion of veteran Beastie warriors, and the
Beaties developed a considerable fear of psionic power being used
against them. The Maladaran resistance took advantage of that fear,
even as they found ways to gain greater access to psi power.

The resistance was a nuisance, nothing more, but it was a constant
distraction even as Koalidi faced larger problems elsewhere. He
concluded that he had too many different things cooking at once, and
resolved to simplify the situation.

Koalidi had no intention of giving the Homosentients time and
breathing space to continue renewing their strength, and he knew all
too well that as long as so many centers of enemy power remained,
someone on one of them might find some new weakness to exploit, some
way to turn the tables back against the Beasties. He concluded that
the remaining enemy resistance had to be broken before he could
proceeded with his virus plan. But he still had the little problem
that with his hordes at war with themselves, he lacked the
Beastie-power to carry out this goal. But the discovery of the huge
Helian fleet-cache gave him another option.

Koalidi now conceived a plan that he considered a stroke of genius.
An objective Beastie, upon hearing the plan, might have concluded that
its creator had actually simply had a stroke, but no Beastie could be
objective about Koalidi. They were designed that way.

The vast supply of orichalcum that had come into Koalidi's possession
could be used to do any number of things. Among them was construct
specialized spacecraft and weapons, with abilities most ships lacked.
Koalidi now set the Beastie engineering teams to work on just that,
tearing the half-billion year old iceships apart to extract their
orichalcum, casting aside and shredding an archaeological treasure in
the process. [2]

What Koalidi had decided to do was to launch an all-out, total assault
on Eosia itself.

Attacking the most heavily fortified world in known space,
disregarding hundreds of softer but strategically critical targets,
was probably not an entirely rational plan. Koalidi's plans weren't
total madness, however. He hoped to inflict a psychological blow
on the remnants of the Hegemony. Eosia was the hearth world, the
font of civilization itself. For the dominant Homosentient species (H.
eostellaris), it was the ancestral homeland. Even for the other
Homosentient species in the Hegemony, Eosia was a symbol, almost
inseparably fused with the very concept of civilization and culture.
On many other Homosentient worlds, it had been the arrival of Eosians
that had marked the beginning of an existence above bare subsistence.

If he could manage to capture or wreck Eosia, Koalidi knew he would be
inflicting a terrible psychological and emotional blow to the
remaining Hegemony worlds. Indeed, even those worlds that had been
cut off from the Hegemony for decades, resisting on their own, would
be affected when the news reached them, as Koalidi would see that it
did.

If even so Koalidi overestimated the impact such a disaster would
have, it should be noted that he was, after all, in the final analysis
barking mad.

But launching such an assault was no trivial undertaking. After well
over a century of warfare, Eosia was fantastically fortified against
invasion. As the center of the Hegemony, it was in an incovenient
place for such an attack, managing to 'sneak up' on it would be very,
very uncertain. An ordinary assault force would have to stop
periodically to renew its resources and recharge its engines, and most
of the star systems near Eos System had either automated sensor
stations or manned facilities watching for just that, ready to use the
remaining telepathic psicoms or ultra-fast courier ships to send
warning ahead.

But starships could be constructed with greater range, able to
remain in interstellar space and avoid these watchers. Weapons of
immense power could be built, with such supplies of orichalcum as
Koalidi now possessed. If Koalidi's armies were greatly shrunken now,
they were still large in absolute terms if all thrown against a single
target such as Eosia.

Still, all of Koalidi's strategists opposed the plan. All of his
experienced commanders advised against the attack. Koalidi dismissed
their concerns, because he was not particularly concerned about losses
at this point, as long as he could knock out the center of his
opponent's power. Yet again, too, his visceral hatred of his former
genus led him to underestimate the risks he was taking.

The preparations went around the clock once Koalidi gave the order.
Every resource of the loyalist Beasties were poured into the
preparations. Even so, it took some years of such crushing effort to
complete the work.

It was in the year 31,143 BC that the preparations were finally
complete. In the skies above Maladara, a fleet had taken shape, a
fleet of ships of unique design, carrying weapons of tremendous power.
Aboard them were the majority of the Beastie warriors still loyal to
Koalidi. Also aboard them lead ship was Koalidi himself. Taking
personal command was probably not the most sensible thing Koalidi ever
did, but he was determined to be present at this moment, which was a
moment of tremendous psychological significance for Koalidi.

The ships were designed to be able to make long interstellar crossings
without stopovers, to faciliate secrecy. They traveled far from most
stars, as they made their way toward Eos System by a round-about
course, planning to come upon the target star from the direct of the
Galaction Core rather than the direction of the Malus System, which
was the most closely watched approach path for the enemy.

MORE LATER.


[1] Ironically, Koalidi had no suspicion that something very similar
had already been done by the Helialisks to limit later Beastie
numbers.

[2] In fairness, Homosentients had done the same thing many times with
such caches, though usually with a little less haste and indifference.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Thus it was well into 31,141 BC that the ships finally began to
approach the Eos System, and preparations for the great attack began
aboard the attack ships.

They had no real hope of a sneak attack, and they knew it well enough.
Even approaching from the least likely direction only bought them a
few extra days grace. Well before they actually entered the Eos
System, the FTL-emissions of their engines and other systems had set
alarms to ringing all over Eosia. The Eosians had so many
sensor-platforms, observation stations, and detector arrays out that
they received nearly 5 days warning of the attack.

At first, the Eosian leadership could not quite believe what their
sensors were telling them. The attack was so improbable, so bizarre a
thing to do, that nearly an Eosian day was wasted in trying to figure
out what was really happening, rather than accepting what they were
detecting. When it became clear that it was a full-scale Beastie
attack, alarms went out, weapons were armed, fleets took to the sky,
and the greatest space battle in Homosentient history to that date
began as the attack fleet was intercepted by the first wave of
defending spacecraft.

The initial engagements went badly for the Homosentients. The special
ships Koalidi had built were huge and heavily armed, armored, and
shielded, and they overwhelmed the Eosian defending ships fairly
rapidly. But as they approached closer, they came within range of
huge ultraviolet laser arrays orbiting Eos, drawing enormous
energy from the star. These beams proved more effective, disabling
many of Koalidi's attack ships at extreme distances. But the attack
fleet was widely spread, and the arrays could only fire on so many
targets at a time. Even with FTL communications and sensing, the
distances were a problem for command and control.

Also, Koalidi had brought his own huge laser-arrays, mounted on FTL
engines. They had the disadvantage that they couldn't draw on a
constant solar energy flux for power, but they mounted gargantuan
arrays of energy storage cells and some of the largest nuclear
energizers ever built in the Hegemonic Age. The solar laser-arrays
could outlast them, but while the Beastie arrays lasted they inflicted
terrible damage on the Eosian defenders.

Meanwhile another weapon Koalidi had brought was put into play, and it
was devastating. With plentiful orichalcum, Koalidi had built
literally millions of missiles, with 'reactionless' engines, not very
large but able to manage huge accelerations for limited times. They
had complicated guidance systems, sensors, and their own onboard
defense systems and weapons to protect themselves on their way to
their targets.

Such missiles had been technologically possible throughout the War,
but neither side had ever used many, for lack of the orichalcum to
burn on them. Koalidi had received a lucky break that overcame that
problem, and his attack force carried millions of them. Now he
launched them.

Over the course of the following weeks, these missiles wrecked havoc
on the Eosian defenses. Some targeted and destroyed critical
facilities before the Eosians knew what was happening. Others shut
down to near wait-states, only to reactivate hours or days later, to
inflict damage when least expected. Some of them managed, over the
course of several weeks, to destroy, one by one, the huge laser arrays
that had enabled the Eosians to keep Koalidi's main forces at an
extreme distance. When the last of those arrays was disabled,
Koalidi's huge warships and troop transports began to advance on their
target.

There were still smaller laser-arrays orbiting Eosia itself, and other
defenses in place, but bit by bit, at tremendous cost to themselves,
the Beasties cut their way through the defenses. The efforts of the
Eosians were constantly bedeviled by the remaining supermissiles that
still periodically inflicted damage, usually in the worst possible
places and times.

Emergency requests for help had gone out at the start of the attack,
and Koalidi had made no effort to stop it. He knew, in fact, that he
couldn't hope to stop it. Eosia could launch too many couriers, and
had too many psicoms, to be silenced. Koalidi had gambled that the
Homosentients would miscalculate the situation, and he was partly
right.

Koalidi had guessed that the Homosentients would be so stunned at the
daring attack on Eosia that they would assume that the Beasties had
far more force than they actually did, and be too afraid to let down
their own defenses to send aid to the homeworld. After all, he hoped
the thinking would go, if the Beasties had so much power that they
could launch such an attack on Eosia itself, surely they would be
hitting the other remaining worlds in the near future too.

Koalidi's hopes were borne out to a point. That exact fear led the
other worlds of the Hegemony to hold back more of their forces than
they otherwise wuold, but they did send help, and if only a modest
amount could come from any world, there were enough remaining worlds
that a large combined force was on its way.

In the meantime, the fighting raged hotter. At last, enough of the
defenses were cut through that Koalidi's remaining supermissiles could
begin to impact on targets on Eosia and its moons themselves. As 500
megaton nuclear explosions rose over ancient cities, the final stage
of the battle began.

Koalidi knew that the remaining defenses were strong enough, even with
the gaps he had torn through them, to prevent him from successfully
carrying out a mass-destruction attack. He would run out of warheads
before they ran out of defensive options, and Eosia would emerge
bleeding but functional. Instead, he used the mass-destruction
attacks to keep the defenders fully occupied, while the transports
began to disgorge Beastie warriors for the actual invasion itself.

The 'transports' were specially designed. Instead of landing, or
launching shuttles, to deliver their cargo of warriors, each
'transport ship' broke up at it approached the planet into thousands
of small reentry modules, each one carrying only a handful of
Beasties, usually no more than 10-20. Many, many such pods were
destroyed by the planetary defenses, but there were millions of
them, falling into the atmosphere all over Eosia.

To make matters worse, each pod had its own defensive shield
generator. This was another technique that had been possible from an
engineering POV throughout the War, but which neither side had ever
used for lack of sufficient orichalcum to justify the expense.
Koalidi now had plentiful supplies of the miracle substance, and thus
each pod, which should have been a flimsy target, required a serious
expenditure of energy or a major kinetic impact to destroy.

The heavy laser arrays and missile batteries in orbit around Eosia
were forced to divide their efforts between the landing pods and the
heavy starships launching mass destruction attacks. Local defenses on
the surface were free to engage the attack pods, but the shield
generators made them highly durable in the face of these lesser
weapons.

Even so, the defenders managed to knock 40% of the attack pods out of
the sky. Unfortunately, 60% of 10 million pods enabled six million
landers to reach the ground and disgorge over 40 million heavily
armed veteran Beastie warriors.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The defense planners had considered the possibility of a ground
invasion of Eosia, in their theoretical exercises, but they had never
really taken the possibility as seriously as they really should have
done. Even when they wargamed the possibility, the invasion force was
always assumed to number in the hundreds of thousands, or at most a
million, because of the difficulty of landing any larger force. Even
that many was considered a practical improbability. Unfortunately the
possession of a huge supply of orichalcum by the enemy had changed all
the rules.

Finding themselves contending with a nightmarishly huge invasion force
on the surface left the defenders efforts split a dozen different ways
as they struggled to fend off both the space assault and the attack on
the ground. In spite of their efforts, it wasn't long before the
cities were on fire, the fortresses battling ground attack on every
front, and the space attack pressing in as confusion spread across
Eosia.

As the reinforcements from neighboring planets began to arrive, they
found the homeworld locked in chaos. The new forces began to turn the
tide against the Beastie space forces, but the ground war raged on,
and the death tolls were beyond nightmarish. Eosia had boasted a
Homosentient population of some 3 billion before the attack began,
most of them H. eostellaris but with a fair smattering of other
species. Now people were dying by the millions.

The battle went on for months. In space, the tide slowly turned, as
it became clear that no additional forces were forthcoming from the
enemy, and more forces arrived from the other worlds. But so heavily
armed and protected were the Beastie ships, so huge a difference did
the possession of plentiful orichalcum make, that it took nearly 19
Terran weeks to finally regain 'space control' around Eosia.

Eventually, the Beastie attack force (or what was left of it) was
forced to retreat, with enormous loses, from the Eos System. They had
taken immense losses, and only about 20% of the ships that entered the
Eos System left it. But the damage they had inflicted was staggering.

The Hegemony forces controlled space around Eosia, but on the surface,
a full-scale ground war raged. The Beasties, with their rapid rate of
reproduction, could increase their numbers rapidly once they were
established on the surface, and they did. By the time the
Homosentients had established space control, a second generation of
Beastie warriors were already fighting on the surface, making up much
of the losses from fighting the natives.

Koalidi's plan had failed, in that Eosia had not been decisively and
utterly taken out of the picture. But now the homeworld was locked in
intense warfare, and the use of mass destruction weapons was ruled out
by the intermixture of the civilian population and their attackers.
They could be used locally, when a concentration of Beasties justified
it, but the Beasties were dug in all over Eosia. In spite of the
overall failure of the attack, the psychological impact of having the
homeworld so beset did have much of the effect Koalidi had sought.

One of the entities who did not depart the Eos System when the fleet
retreated was Koalidi himself. He had landed on Eosia in the initial
attack waves, and now found himself leading the ground war on the
homeworld of Homosentient civilization. He had no immediate line of
retreat, but he was far from ready to give up.

Events were now moving very fast. About what happened next...

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Beastie forces on Eosia found themselves on the horns of a cruel
dilemma. There were tens of millions of them, well-armed and dug in.
They were on the soil of the heart-world of the Hegemony, and if the
Homosentients outnumbered them, many of them were elderly, children,
or otherwise not warriors. The number of warriors on each side were
comparable, and the Beastie speed of reproduction was such that that
balance was more likely to tilt for them than against them.

The enemy had space control, but they could not readily use mass
destruction weaponry, because the Beasties and the Homosentients on
the surface were so tangled together. However, if the Beasties began
to gain control of a region, to overcome the Homosentient armies, then
that condition changed and the naval ships in orbit could rain nuclear
and laser death on the conquered lands. Thus victory became a defeat
condition.

Koalidi had a couple of aces up the sleeves he would have worn, if he
still had human arms, though. One of them was that he had managed to
bring a few broodwyrm 'eggs' with them. If he could get them planted
and bring them to maturity, he would have the ability to manufacture
new batches of Beastie warriros by the millions. With his own
personal presence, he could manage to hold together a relatively large
force even with the genetic flaw.

But creating huge hordes of Beasties on the surface would not help as
long as the Homosentients retained full control of the space around
Eosia. To change that he had to arrange additional Beastie forces in
space, which meant he had to gain communication with his base of power
in the Malus System. This was difficult, since the only way to do that
was to send an FTL ship. [1]

Still, Koalidi was far from prepared to give up.

What Koalidi did not and could not know was that he had enormous
problems emerging in his home star system, problems making any relief
from that direction improbable.

As noted earlier, the genetic flaw in the Beasties made it impossible
for them to remain unified when their numbers and population density
rose above a varying level. Koalidi's personal authority was such
that he could hold a much larger force together than would otherwise
have been the case, his personal faction was the largest of the dozens
of factions that had emerged among the Beasties.

Also, such was their programmed deference to Koalidi that even those
factions who would not (and could not) still follow him were unwilling
to act directly against him. Even as the various factions fought each
other, they never attacked the Malus System which was Koalidi's
redoubt. His property and armies were sacrosanct even to the 'rebel'
Beasties.

Or rather, they were while he was there. But when he left, that
changed. The Beastie psychology, driven by their genetic imperatives,
meant that they tended to regard Koalidi's possessions as sacrosacnt
while he possessed them, meaning while he was there. When word
spread among the various factions that Koalidi had left the Malus
System, it became fair game until he returned, with its rich
industrial base, plentiful technical and biological resources, and
above all else, the remaining reserves of orichalcum from the Helian
cache, which had not been used up by the attack on Eosia. [2]

Furthermore, with Koalidi and his most reliable and capable
lieutenants gone, the huge Beastie force on Maladara and in the rest
of the Malus System began to come unraveled into factions. Koalidi
had known this would happen if he were gone too long, but he had
gambled it would take long enough not to matter. He lost the gamble.

It was less than a Terran year before the first rival Beastie attacks
began to befall the Malus System. The orichalcum was just too
tempting a target. The pressure of the attacks accelerated the
tendency of the 'loyalist' Beasties to begin to factionalize
themselves. Within 18 Terran months after the end of the space battle
at Eosia, the Beasties of Maladara were under attack from other
Beasties and beginning to fight each other as well.

It was when reports of this state of affairs made their way back
across the Galaxy to NEMESIS that the final stages of the Beastie War
opened.

The living murder-machine had been watching the war from afar, waiting
for the opportunity to finish off both sides, and periodically and
secretly helping and hindering both sides to encourage them to damage
each other. NEMESIS was restrained by its secrecy directives, and so
forced to use indirect means and subtle approaches, unless the
payoff-to-risk ratio was very high. Now, with the Beasties at war
with each other and the Hegemony facing dug-in invaders on its core
world, the payoff ratio looked to NEMESIS like a good bet.

Still, secrecy was always second-nature, and NEMESIS was by no means
confident that the Eldren were really gone. It had been only a few
tens of thousands of years since any sign of their presence had been
discernable, which was nothing on the scale of the long war between
NEMESIS and the Watcher. NEMESIS knew all too well what would happen
if it gave away its nature and location through some precipitate
action, and the Eldren turned out to be merely hiding and waiting.

Thus, even now when it was about to take direct action, it did it in
such a way as to be misleading. Orders went out to various automated
bases across the Galaxy, to implement a plan long prepared. Starships
emerged from the factories in those bases, controlled by 'nemetic
brains' budded off NEMESIS' main mass, but designed and constructed to
look like standard Beastie and Homosentient ships. NEMESIS even grew
decerebrate Homosentients and Beasties in clone tanks, so that if the
ships were boarded or the remains of one analyzed, it would appear
that they were crewed by one or the other life form. Except for the
key devices necessary to keep the liquid-helium-based 'brains' alive,
and a few other indispensable items, NEMESIS carefully refrained from
using its own TL11 tech, limiting the ships to the TL9 and TL10 tech
used by the Hegemony and the Beasties. It was a masterpiece of
misdirection.

NEMESIS had built thousands of such ships, packed with weapons and
defenses, and far less vulnerable than they appeared because of their
actual lack of a living crew, meaning they needed to carry less mass
for radiation shielding and other considerations. These ships,
disguised as Beastie and Homosentient vessels, proceeded into the war
zone, and began to wreak awesome havoc on each side. Beastie worlds
were attacked by ships that appeared to be Homosentient,
Homosentient-inhabited globes were struck by starships that looked and
acted as if they were built and crewed by Beasties. In each case, the
attacks were pure mass-destruction assaults, not raids or attempts to
capture prisoners or facilities or land or resources.

Even as this first wave was doing its work, another fleet was under
construction in the various hidden bases of NEMESIS. These ships too
were disguised, and when they launched, construction of another wave
of ships began. NEMESIS had waited for centuries for this moment, and
was taking full advantage of the chaos and confusion. Beastie worlds
began to come under what appeared to be attacks from other Beastie
ships, along with the actual attacks that were just that.
Homosentient worlds also now found themselves under attack by what
appeared to be rival Homosentients as well. With Eosia in chaos and
communications with the capitol on Ashtra (a moon of Eosia)
unreliable, confusion was easy to spread.

MORE LATER.


[1] Even if Koalidi and his forces could have commandeered a psicom
station, and convinced a Homosentient telepath to use it to send a
message, there was no matching facility in the Malus System to receive
the message, and no Beastie with sufficient telepathic Power to
operate such a station anyway.


[2] Intellectually, Beasties were fully capable of comprehending that
this attitude was irrational. But they had rather less free will than
Homosentients, and were more driven by their instincts.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The first wave of direct NEMESIS-organized attacks came in early
31,138 BC. The Beastie War had lasted 119 years at this time, and had
reduced the Eosian Hegemony from a multistellar society of over 14,000
worlds to a few separated clusters of worlds, at war with an
artificial species that was itself riven by intraspecific warfare, its
artificial culture coming apart at the seams. Trillions had died,
more trillions maimed, burned, maddened, blighted, starved, or
literally devoured alive. Homosentient society had been forced into
the form of a ruthless military dictatorship dedicated only to
survival, every life shaped by the necessities of defense and survival
from birth to death, the arts, the sciences (except for war-related
work), music, laughter, all subordinated or absent, dreams shattered
and hope reduced to an abstraction.

This was the legacy of Koalidi Byth Kormadois.

NEMESIS had no empathy. It felt neither satisfaction nor pity at this
ghastly spectacle. It merely perceived an opportunity in the chaos
and destruction, and it took it. Its ships, while executing what
appeared to be just more attacks in the ongoing warfare, carefully
destroyed some of the most critical elements of each side's
infrastructure, and since they had no interest in anything but
destruction, these ships had no need to 'hold back' for any reason.
[1]

Within five Terran years, the efforts of NEMESIS had pushed hundreds
of worlds, both Beastie and Homosentient, over the brink, their
civilizations collapsing into subsistence societies, or simply wiped
out. NEMESIS had ordered its minions to make a specific point of
wiping out the psionic communications relays and nodes wherever they
could, and as they did the Homosentient telepathic communication
network simply came apart.

NEMESIS was pleased with this success, but it wanted more. As society
came apart, that more came within reach. NEMESIS had continued to
build its disguised ships, even going to the trouble to designing them
with what appeared to be repaired damage, jury-rigged restorations,
etc. By 31,133 BC, NEMESIS had constructed a fleet of more than
80,000 such disguised, automated ships, of every size and
classification, including some that were unique. NEMESIS now
calculated that it had sufficient force, given the chaos in the
Hegemony and on Eosia itself, to risk launching a knockout strike
against Eosia itself.

Eosia's space defenses had been torn apart by Koalidi's assault five
years earlier, and only partially repaired. NEMESIS had robotic spies
placed all through the power structures of the Eosian government and
society (though they were continuing to be harried by the
mystery-force within the Eosian government that knew about them). [2]

The NEMESIS-fleet began massing at rallying points late in what
Terrans would call the year 31,132 BC. The actual first wave of the
attack came in the middle of that year. Eosia was still being slowly
ripped apart by the warfare on the ground between the armies of Eosia
and the Beastie armies, and much of what space assets remained viable
in near-Eosia space were occupied pinning down and harrying the
Beastie forces on the ground. A few of the huge laser arrays in
near-solar orbit had been rebuilt, but not many. Some crude-stop gaps
were in place, but nothing close to what would be needed now.

The attack, when it came in 31,132 BC, was the worst nightmare of the
space defense personnel of the Eos System. The long-range detectors
picked up what looked to be first one, then two, then six then dozens
of Beastie attack fleets, converging on Eosia from various lines of
approach. Scout ships and probes reported back that there were
thousands of warships approaching.

The defenders, still not recovered from Koalidi's attack some years
earlier, knew in their souls that this was it. The attack that could
not be stopped, the clock tolling for Eosia and in all probability for
their entire civilization.

MORE LATER.


[1] Though the Hegemony-Beastie War was ultimately genocidal in
nature, both sides had reason to refrain from wiping out biospheres,
destroying precious industrial infrastructure, or losing irreplaceable
orichalcum. This forced each side to limit the level of their
depredations. None of this applied to the ships sent by NEMESIS.


[2] This mystery-force (mysterious to NEMESIS) was the AI ARNETHIS,
which itself didn't understand what sort of foe it was shadow-boxing
with. Each AI was playing a game of blind-chess with the other for
very high stakes.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The intelligence teams were stunned. They had learned of the Beastie
deference for their creator, having Koalidi himself on Eosia,
while far from good news, had been a sort of insurance policy. His
presence had caused the warring Beastie factions to refrain from
striking what they perceive as their creator's property (i.e. the Eos
System) while he was there. But now they were attacking and in
unbelievable numbers. Nobody could understand how a
Beastie faction had been able to assemble so many warships, so many
missiles, so many of everything, and in such secrecy, or how they would
attack a world their creator 'owned'.
[1]

Hopeless though it seemed, the defense forces rallied for what they
all knew would be their last stand. The space engagement,
when it opened, was fierce, fast, and over quickly. The
defenders did more damage to the attackers than any rational
strategists would have imagined they could, under the circumstances.
Their backs to the wall and their last stand at hand, they performed
prodigies of cunning and calculation, of effort and sheer lunatic
recklessness. They destroyed nearly 22 percent of the attack force
before they were finally overwhelmed.

But overwhelmed they were.

The defenders were facing an enemy that had no real crews to
irradiate, ships that carried no landing forces. The intellects
controlling them could not be frightened or intimidated.

They were flying fortresses, dense masses of armor and weaponry. They
were built by an enemy with hundreds of millions of years of cunning
experience, an enemy with access to somewhat more advanced technology
and, compared to the defenders, relatively unlimited supplies of
orichalcum. The outcome of the struggle was never in doubt.

This time, no help could come to the mother from her children.
They were too occupied fighting Beasties, ships
pretending to be Beasties, or they had too few defenses left to risk
dividing them even if they were not then being attacked. Eosia
was bare to the skies, which were owned by an
enemy for the first time in thousands of Terran years. The other
living world of the Eos System, Eos V, was in no better state.

On the surface, the ground forces, the civilian population, and
Koalidi's Beasties prepared for what they thought was coming. All
of them expected heavy bombardment from space, followed by invasion.

For his part, Koalidi was unable to comprehend how any Beastie faction
could do what this one seemed to be doing. It violated too many of
their core genetic imperatives. They should literally have found the
idea unthinkable.

Still, he and his Beasties turned their attention from warring with
Eosia's natives to preparing for the invasion. What neither Koalidi
nor the Eosians grasped was that no invasion was forthcoming. That
was not what NEMESIS was all about.

On Ashtra, there was chaos. Ashtra was, in theory, probably the most
heavily fortified facility in Hegemonic space. This moon of Eosia,
was covered entirely with structures, the bare rock visible nowhere. The
strongest shield generators the Eosians knew how to built protected the
moonlet, weapons existed there that should have been powerful
enough to keep the attack fleet too busy to focus on the helpless
cities on the planet below.

But those weapons were silent. The shields were up, but Ashtra was
unable to strike out because most of the population of that moon was
already dead or dying. A disease was loose on Ashtra, a disease
nobody in the Hegemony had ever before encountered, a disease that
seemed to be death itself.

It was, of course, the work of NEMESIS. As soon as sensor warning of
the huge attack fleets had come in, one of the Infiltrator robots used
by NEMESIS had released the disease into Ashtra from hundreds of
source points. It proved to be fantastically communicable, rapidly
disabling, and it spread through the population like some curse of
death.

By the time the attack fleet was assuming position in orbit around
Eosia, only a handful of terrified survivors remained alive on Ashtra.

It had almost been prevented. When sensor alarms had detected the
approach of that huge force of what appeared to be Beasties, ARNETHIS
had activated its own robots and resources and wiped the Infiltrators.

It had been clear that no more distractions could be tolerated, and
ARNETHIS had concluded that the need to track down the inventor of the
robots now had to take a back seat to the need to avoid distractions
during this ultimate struggle.

NEMESIS had never suspected how fully its mysterious foe had
penetrated the Infiltrator masquerade. Unfortunately, ARNETHIS had
missed one. Just one.

In the capitol city of Eosia, on the northern continent, the tension
in the air was the more palpable for the fact that it was a beautiful
day. It was afternoon on a summer day, a breeze blew off
the sea to cool the heat of the day, the sky was a cerulean blue that
might have formed the backdrop of a painting. All this formed
a surreal counterpoint to the thousands of starships they all knew
were moving into position above that blue sky.

Koalidi was on the southern continent, his forces having dug into a
vast wilderness preserve centered on an island off the coast of the
southern continent. This had once been a heavily inhabited region,
2000 years before, but now it was a preserve, allowed to return
almost to a natural state. It was in that part of the southern
continent, and especially on that island where Koalidi now stood, the
the oldest artifacts of the Eosian stone age had been found.

Indeed, the island had been the site where archaeologists had
discovered a few very items of worked stone that were chemically
weird, matching no site on Eosia. When scientists had realized that
Man was not, in fact, native to Eosia, it had gradually become
clear that wherever Man had arrived from, it was on this island that
he had arrived. [2]

It was winter here, but the island was just south of the tropic zone
and the weather was mild. Night had fallen, as Koalidi started as the
sky through his altered eyes, seeing the tiny points of light in the
clear night sky that he knew represented starships which he thought
were crewed by Beasties who had somehow gone mad.

Lowering his eyes, he looked around at the glowing, bioluminescent
plants that surrounded them. It was here, if the archaeologists could
be believed, that his own distant ancestors had arrived on Eosia
from...wherever. Irritated to be reminded of what he had once been, he
idly wished he had a prisoner to eat.

On Ashtra, ARNETHIS was experiencing an emotional state it had heard
of, but never tasted until now...angry despair. Trapped on a moonlet
inhabited mostly by corpses, able to observe what was happening and
powerless to do anything to affect it, the AI had never known anything
like the emotions that now flooded its biocomp core.

Koalidi descended through the concealed opening into their
underground field command center. So well hidden was this one that it
had been Koalidi's base for nearly an Eosian year. He approached the
communications panel, where some of his highest ranking
Beasties were studying the increasing odd situation.

"Perfect One," his chief strategist addressed him in a combination of
telepathic and ultrasonic signals, "the attack fleet has taken up a
distribution that makes no sense. Attempting to launch an
invasion from that position would be all but impossible. It is as if
they had no plans beyond bombardment."

That made little sense to Koalidi. Why would they bombard if they had
no plans to land? Destruction of such a prize, when it finally lay
open to capture, with its rich treasure of resources, infrastructure,
knowledge and prisoners, seemed...perverse.

In the capitol city, First Marshall Gra'th'thcka stepped out onto the
roof of the Admiralty Tower, to gaze up at the darkening sky as Eos
fell below the horizon. He had been studying the enemy fleet
deployment for hours, and he had a good idea of what was about
to happen. He debated trying to get out of the city, but it seemed
futile. He had passed the warning, of course, and evacuation
was underway. He himself planned to wait where he was and
enjoy the lovely sunset. It was to be, after all, his last.

He wished he could see his wife and grandchildren again, though. On
the other hand, he was very grateful that they were not on Eosia. As
a Homo sapiens himself, he found himself suddenly grateful that
his wife had always preferred to spend part of each year on their home
world. Perhaps, just perhaps, his grandchildren might survive to see
a better day.

The wind blew through his thick white hair. He grinned at the memory
of how fascinated by that head of hair the local girls had been when
he first came to Eosia as a green officer. It was a rare Eosian male,
after all, who was not naturally bald.

The Admiral looked out at the spectacular fire of the
remaining sunset, and looked up at the darkening sky. He wondered
just how long it would be.

He was still wondering that, just moments later, when he ceased to
wonder anything at all in this life, as a 100 megaton nuclear
explosion erupted through the city, the first of thousands of such
that began to rain down from the ships orbiting above.

MORE LATER.

[1] The reason, of course, is that they weren't really Beastie ships,
they were the disguised ships of NEMESIS, who cared nothing for Koalidi.

[2] The 'chemically odd' artifacts were a spearhead, hide
scrapers, and a stone knife. The site they would have matched was in
Africa.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

ARNETHIS watched in helpless despair as the attack fleet began to bomb
the helpless world below. ARNETHIS had expected this, to soften up
the planet for the invasion to follow, but now, to ARNETHIS' growing
horror, the enemy did not seem to stopping the bombardment. It just
went on, and on, and on. Laser beams burned into the atmosphere, as
did the strongest particle beams ARNETHIS had ever scanned. Missile
after missile after multi-warhead, multi-megaton missile flashed down,
overwhelming the defense batteries.

Within a few hours, ARNETHIS had realized that contrary to almost all
observed Beastie behavior, over the course of more than a century of
war, these Beasties showed no interest in prisoners, captured
infrastructure, or anything except sheer destruction. Indeed, so much
radiation had been introduced into the Eosian biosphere already that
even Beasties could not hope to make any practical use of the northern
hemisphere for decades.

To the south, the great wilderness area in which Koalidi and his
forces hid was more lightly struck. There was less of immediate
priority to strike there. By this point, 12 hours into the
bombardment, Koalidi was quite sure, absolutely sure, that these
creatures, whoever they were, were not his Beasties. They just did
not act like Beasties, in any way.

Nonetheless, Koalidi had no time to ponder the matter. There had been
a few bombs fall in his region, and the ground shock wave from one had
been sufficient to collapse their hidden command post. Koalidi had
gotten out alive, but wounded, with two limbs dangling uselessly until
his medics could attend to them. He and his leadership cadre were now
crossing a wilderness area on 'foot' (many feet, in fact) to their
prearranged fallback point. Something was nagging Koalidi, some bit
of trivia he half-remembered about the Eosian wilderness, but he
couldn't place it with all the other considerations.

It had been something about the danger of blood near open water,
something about some kind of reptile...

In the meantime, the cities of Eosia burned. Radioactive clouds were
spreading downwind, poisoning farmland and wilderness. Heavy laser
and particle bombardment was blasting down the shields that still
protected some critical facilities. Hour after hour, then day after
day, the sky continued to rain death. Eos V fared no better.

At last, though, the attack slowed, then stopped. Aboard the attack
vessels, the nemetic brains that ran them were measuring the benefit
of destroying Solarigen life against the cost of drawing more
attention to their own activities than was prudent.

It would have been a plus, from the POV of NEMESIS, to wipe out as
much of the Eosian biosphere (and Eos V's, for that matter) as they
could manage while they were about it. But already this attack was so
odd, by Beastie standards, that it was going to seem bizarre to the
remaining Homosentient worlds. Soon, scout ships from those worlds
would be arriving to investigate. It would be to risky to linger,
there would be nearly a 9% chance that the deception would be
penetrated or compromised.

So those pseudo-Beastie ships, for their own inscrutable reasons,
ceased their genocidal attack and withdrew, leaving a world aflame.

First Marshall Gra'th'thcka, had he still lived, would not have
recognized the spot where he had watched a sunset, just weeks before.
Where once a city of 90 million had stood, there was now only a great
lake of formerly molten rock and metal, now cooling to a glassy plain.
The firestorm that had spread out from the site of the multiple
nuclear explosions had burned the forest cover for 100 miles in all
directions.

On Ashtra, ARNETHIS was the only conscious entity left. Mercifully,
it was in a state that in a Homosentient might be called shock. It
was almost in a fugue state. It would emerge from its paralysis, but
for now the horror of what had happened was more than it could deal
with, as it remained locked in its own mind, the only consciousness on
a moonlet of corpses.

As for Koalidi Byth Kormadois, a barrage of heavy laser beams from the
orbiting ships had burned through the atmosphere not from where they
were. It had actually been a mistaken shot by the NEMESIS ships,
since there was nothing of strategic importance in the target zone.
But the beam had struck near enough to start a local forest fire, and
Koalidi and a couple of his elite guard had been separated from the
main force.

All were wounded, and as they tried to ford a river to regain contact
with their fellows, the blood had drawn the attention of a group of
local native fauna. It proved to be a reptilian predator of some
size.

For all his biological knowledge of cells and DNA, proteins and
physiology, he was not a true naturalist, especially not of species
not from Maladara. Though these predators were large, he was
confident a few slashes from the razor-sharp bone of his remaining
striker arm would force it to back off.

Thus is was that Koalidi received a useful lesson about the pain
tolerance of the Eosian supercrocs, and another relevant less about
the amount of pressure their bite can apply, as the croc bit off the
striker arm at the shoulder.

Koalidi and his guards were armed with slugthrowers, but somehow in
the confusion they were lost or dropped. One guard managed to shoot
one supercroc before another got it from behind, dragging it under
with its limbs still waving frantically, powerless to strike.

The altercation was brief. When Eos rose the following morning, its
rays shone through the eerie clouds of ash and dust onto a riverbank,
on which several supercrocs sunned themselves, as they digested their
very oddly-shaped and odd-tasting meal.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As reports returned to NEMESIS of the success of its assault on the
heartworld of the Hegemony, a certain satisfaction pervaded the great
living computer's thought processes. It was simply incapable of
gloating, or exulting. There was literally nothing personal in its
ongoing efforts at genocide. It could and did, however, feel
satisfaction at a 'job well done'.

The murder-machine had succeeded in accomplishing what Koalidi had
failed to accomplish a few years earlier, i.e. stopping the beating
heart of the what remained of the Eosian Hegemony. As the news spread
outward, it is difficult to overstate the horror and shock it brought
with it. For over two thousand years, Eosia had been the wellspring
of science, art, and culture, language and music, government and law.
What the city of Rome was to the late Classical Civilization on Earth,
Eosia was to the Hegemony, that and much more. It was almost
inconceivable that it could have fallen, and fallen with such
finality.

For its fall was final. So extensive was the damage, so terrible the
wounds that the pseudo-Beastie fleet had inflicted, that there was no
way to even pretend that it was going to recover anytime in the
foreseeable future. The northern hemisphere was poisoned by enough
radioactive fallout to make the surface unlivable for Homosentients
(without protective gear) for 20 Eosian years, or 30 Terran ones, more
or less. In some regions, it would be much, much longer before the
radiation died away enough for resettlement.

There was not a single population center with more than 1000 residents
that had been spared the bombardment. Scout ships from the other
surviving Hegemony worlds searched the planet from orbit and by
penetrating the atmosphere, hoping against hope to find something
still surviving. They did, of course, find many survivors. Some they
were able to evacuate from the planet. Some refused to leave. Many
were never found by the scouts, being in the wrong place or the wrong
time.

Nobody dared approach Ashtra. It remained horribly silent to all
attempts to communicate, its defense shields still intact, but with no
sign of life on the surface, and the conclusion was drawn (correctly)
that the entire population of the moonlet was dead. [1]

In fear of the disease that was known to have ravaged the population
of the moonlet, it was simply placed off-limits until a later date.
[2]

The governing structure on Ashtra and its related institutions on
Eosia had been the glue that held what was left of the Hegemony
together. Now, with that glue gone, the coordination of the Hegemony
began to break down. This was have been fatal, but for the fact that
the Beasties had suffered a comparable blow. As news of the assumed
(they couldn't be 100% certain, but there appeared to be little doubt)
death of Koalidi spread, the Beasties began to lose what cohesion they
themselves had retained, breaking up into smaller and smaller
subgroups warring on each other at least as hard as they did the
collapsing Hegemony.

Over the course of 50 Terran years (more or less), what had been an
interstellar civilization collapsed into a squabbling collection of
worlds, some at war with each other, many at war with themselves,
others collapsing back to lower levels of technical skill for lack of
resources and skilled, trained personnel. Worlds that had operated at
TL9/10 at the time of the fall of Eosia had often fallen to effective
TL8, TL7, or lower half a Terran century later. It wasn't that they
forgot the higher technologies, they retained some of them, but they
lacked the population, industrial base, and resources to make much use
of the higher levels. Some worlds were so devastated by the Beastie
War and the collapse that followed it that they collapsed back to TL4
or lower agricultural subsistence societies. Many Beastie-inhabited
worlds experienced similar fates.

Luckily for the Homosentients, it was during this period that the
earlier subtle genetic sabotage by the Helialisks began to take
effect. Beastie reproduction rates began to plummet, and with their
own technical base coming apart, they could do little about it. The
remained fast-breeders, but nothing like what Koalidi had intended
them to be. On worlds where both Homosentients and Beasties survived
(which was many) that were forced down the tech level scale, this loss
of reproductive rate made it possible for the Homosentients to counter
their foes, and sometimes overcome them.

On Maladara, with Koalidi gone and the planet having been subjected to
successive attacks by both rival Beastie factions and the
pseudo-Beastie and pseudo-Homosentient fleets NEMESIS had fielded,
something improbable happened: the remaining Maladaran Resistance
managed to retake their world. They did this by dint of having become
some of the most effective, most savagely ruthless, and most capable
guerrilla warriors who ever lived, and by their perfection of psionics
as a weapon of war to a degree that would not be seen again until the
rise of the Atlanteans, and by a considerable dose of luck.

The world they recaptured, after they managed to destroy the
MasterWyrm and the other broodwyrms (a tale to be told in itself) and
drive the local Beastie population to extinction, was radically
changed from the one that had existed just 175 years before. The
people who retook it had little in common with their ancestors from
that earlier time, also. We will look in on Maladara again, in due
time, but for now, our focus must shift away from the liberated
Beastie birth-world.

With the collapse of the larger civilization, many worlds found
themselves effectively isolated. Without access to orichalcum, they
could not build FTL engines, even those that retained their tech base.
Many worlds had only the orichalcum actually in use in their machines
and ships, and no way to gain more.
It had been access to a natural supply of the miracle-material (on Eos
I) that had enabled the Eosians to found interstellar civilization in
the first place. [3]

NEMESIS, restrained by its secrecy imperatives and concerns about
where the Eldren were and whether they might still be quietly
watching, dared not take this opportunity to finish off both the
Beasties and the Homosentients of the former Hegemony. As
interstellar warfare dribbled off to nothing, it was no longer
possible to pass off its starships as disguised ships for one side or
the other, since both sides were effectively collapsed, reduced to
one-world or one-star-system operations, cut off from each other.

Instead, NEMESIS began to watch the former Hegemony-worlds for any
sign of resurgant star flight, ready to intervene to prevent such. It
also began to search the Galaxy for other signs of intelligent
tool-using Solarigen life. It had been caught off-guard by the
appearance of the Eosian Hegemony, it knew now that something else of
the sort might well be happening elsewhere. It also turned more of
its vast parallel attention back to its long-term goal, the plan it
was developing for a second attempt at a general extinction of ALL
Solarigen life.

It had tried such a galaxy-wide assault once before, at the end of the
Permian Period. It had failed then, though it did inflict enormous
damage. Now it was working out the details of a plan for a more
effective second general attempt.

NEMESIS was right to be worried about other potential tool-using
Solarigens, not just other Homosentients, as we shall see. But that
is a tale for another time and thread, and regarding the Eosian
Civilization, we must now regretfully turn away from the ruins to
which is was reduced. The overall story will continue, though, even
if Eosia is no longer the central stage, and its legacies will endure.

THE END

[1] That ARNETHIS had become sapient was a deep secret, and almost
everyone who knew it was now dead. The AI still lived, but it was
deep in a fugue state, not even aware of the hails.

[2] This would prove to be a momentous decision, though nobody at the
time could possibly have realized it.

[3] FTL travel IS possible without orichalcum, as are some of the
other things the substance is useful for. It is, however, much, much
harder.