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Old 06-20-2010, 12:45 PM   #31
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

Note: I was slightly unclear about the precise sequence of events in
the last posting. The incident in which the conspiracy became the
Conspiracy, through the confluence of the 'imprinter' process and the
nihilism they absorbed from the foreign philosophy, came before the
creation of the M. tragicus apes that formed the basis of much of
their wealth. [1]

The political/commercial structure which grew up around the Seven
Families was the wealthiest and most politically potent force on
Maladara, but there were other power centers, and had the Maladarans,
for all their cultural 'rebelliousness', known of the actual thinking
of the inner circle of the Seven Families, the Conspiracy would have
been rapidly crushed. So they had to proceed cautiously, even as
their impatience grew. Due to the imprinter process, the impatience
itself tended to pass from generation to generation in amplifying
intensities, but it was restrained by necessity and an equally
inherited sense of adherence to their larger plan.

Meanwhile, the biotechnological research that put Maladara at the
forefront of the field in the Hegemony continued, and that sponsored
by the Seven Families was the most advanced on Maladara. With their
resources, combined with the lure of the enormous academic community
of the planet, it was easy to draw the best minds in the field to the
planet to work, and their work was channeled and focused. But it was
a single individual who would make possible the breakthrough that
armed the Conspiracy with their greatest weapon, and made possible the
horrible sequence of events that would bring disaster onto the Eosian
Hegemony.

Perhaps it was sheer luck, perhaps (as some would later speculate in
anger, fear, and hate) it was infernal intervention. Either way, a
genius was born into the very ranks of the Seven Families, the most
talented bioengineer in the history of the Eosian Hegemony. His name,
phonetically rendered, would be spelled something like Koalidi. He
was imprinted at the age of 12, inheriting the twisted motivations of
dozens of generations of previous conspirators, and he was raised in
an environment that lent itself to a twisted view of life.

But the twisting of his personality did little to inhibit his native
genius, if anything, it amplified the effect of that natural talent,
by adding an overwhelming, driving, irrational compulsion to achieve
everything he possibly could with that talent. That talent was both
theoretical and practical, and while centered in the biological
sciences and bioengineering, lent itself sufficiently to other fields
to make him eminently able to coordinate teams of specialists from
many disciplines. To make this combination the more impressive (and
the more dangerous in context), he was charismatic and a skilled
'people person', with no small ability as an administrator. [2]

It should not be thought that Koalidi achieved everything purely by
his own efforts, of course. He led large cross-disciplinary teams,
some of whom knew the purpose they worked toward, and many who did
not. But the core spark of genius was his, that made possible his
greatest creation, among many.

By the time he was 30, Koalidi had developed to their highest pitch
the techniques of control that made the 'tragic apes' such tragically
effective slaves. By the age of 35, he had presided over the creation
of symbiotic life-forms completely out of scale with anything else on
Maladara (and thus in the entire Hegemony). But his greatest work,
his life-work, he did not bring to completion until the age of 81,
after literally decades of brilliant, and morally bankrupt, effort.

At the age of 81 (late middle age for his species and society and tech
level), in a year Terrans would call 31,400 BC, Koalidi had succeeded
in creating the first broodwyrm. [3]

We shall learn more about broodwyrms later. For the moment, suffice
it to say that it was the greatest development in the history of
Maladaran biotechnology up until that time, perhaps the greatest
achievement of Maladaran biotech ever. The existence of that first
broodwyrm, and the resources and abilities to provided, enabled
Koalidi to become the leader of the Conspiracy, and his later decades
were divided between the work of the Conspiracy, and the biotech work
he continued to research. But the creation of the broodwyrm marked
the peak of his career, and the start of the final countdown to
disaster.

But about that...MORE LATER.

[1] For more about the M. tragicus apes I keep mentioning, see here:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...54#post1004054

[2] Is it surprising that so many people, on myriad worlds, who later
suffered from the results of his talents thought his advent to be too
horrible for coincidence?

[3] The name 'broodwyrm' will be applied by Terrans. The Maladaran
word would be a meaningless noise.

Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 06-20-2010 at 08:26 PM.
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Old 06-20-2010, 08:35 PM   #32
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

Those who later believed that Koalidi must have had help beyond mortal
ken were many, and the question of supernatural intervention is beyond
answering. But they were certainly right that he had help beyond that
of Homosentience. This help, however, came from a source firmly
planted in this physical universe.
Quote:
So NEMESIS, as it had done so often before, now looked for an
indirect means of attack. After some due time and consideration, it
found one.
NEMESIS had been watching the Hegemony for over a century before
Koalidi was born, its robots and sensors probing all across the united
worlds. It had learned much, and it was perpetually searching for
weak spots, for places where it could, by discreet action, turn the
Hegemony against itself in ways small and great. It found many such,
on thousands of worlds, but few that it calculated offered such a
wealth of opportunity as it found on Maladara.

NEMESIS used robots so perfectly designed that with care, they could
pass for H. eostellaris or H. sapiens (or other species) for
decades at a time. They were always fantastically cautious, secrecy
was of the essence. But NEMESIS, with its ability to correlate
millions of tiny details, gathered from countless sources, discerned
the existence of the Seven Families conspiracy, and through some of
its robots its made cautious contact, and eventually formed an
alliance of sorts with the conspiracy. [1]

When Koalidi was born, the local NEMESIS-budding recognized his
potential early, and encouraged it. Later in life, when the promising
child had grown into a twisted genius, through myriad devious and
subtle channels NEMESIS directed useful information to Koalidi and his
research teams. NEMESIS had been observing Solarigen life for almost
half a billion years, and it had access to information on the subject
that no Homosentient did. Throughout his life (up until a certain
critical point) Koalidi always had at least one NEMESIS Infiltrator
robot near him, in various 'identities'. These machines were all
teleoperated by a budding from NEMESIS itself. [2]

In the final stages of his Homosentient career, from about age 70 or
so, Koalidi was matched with a female-model H. sapiens type
Infiltrator that acted as his personal assistant, both in technical
matters and personal. [3]

Koalidi had no idea 'she' was a robot, he thought she was a member of
the other group the Seven Families had allied with. He knew her
interest in him was purely selfish, as was his in her, and that suited
him. He also thought she was a brilliant intellect with knowledge of
biotechnology almost equal to his. [4]

This was the secret that enabled Koalidi, with his fantastic native
genius, to operate fully two TLs above even the Maladaran
state-of-the-art in biotech. Even NEMESIS could not match that level
of ability without Koalidi's gifts.

MORE LATER.


[1] The conspirators, of course, had no idea what they were _really_
dealing with, or even that they were dealing with robots. OTOH, they
had no more intention of keeping faith with their 'partners' than
NEMESIS did with them.

[2] There'll be a bit more about that coming, too.

[3] NEMESIS normally did not want the Infiltrators involved in
anything sexual or pretended intimate, the risk of discovery in either
relationship was high. But Koalidi's twisted tastes and the
circumstances made for a special case.

[4] The robot's knowledge base (or rather the NEMESIS-budding's
knowledge] actually surpassed Koalidi's in some ways. The brilliance
was less genuine genius than sheer volume of otherwise unavailable
information.
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Old 06-20-2010, 08:41 PM   #33
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

But NEMESIS did not know that Koalidi and his teams were creating the
broodwyrms with their newfound biotechnological abilities. The
murder-machine was planning to manipulate the Seven Families to use
the biotechnology it was developing in tandem with other, apparently
unrelated sources of trouble across the Hegemony (as usual, NEMESIS
had its metaphorical tentacles in many matters at once) to stir up a
civil war.

While the broodwyrms could certainly be useful to that end, from the
point of view of NEMESIS they would have been altogether too
useful. Their tremendous abilities were just exactly the sort of thing
NEMESIS did not want to see in the possession of Solarigen life. A
broodwyrm could make it nearly impossible to permanently make a
species extinct, it could accelerate recovery from ecological losses,
it had potentials beyond anything NEMESIS would have wished to see
developed by Homosentients.

Had NEMESIS known, it would have wiped out the Seven Families
conspiracy immediately, but they managed to keep their plans secret
from their 'partners'. It was not an easy thing to do, but NEMESIS
had only a handful of Infiltrator units among them, and they had to
act cautiously as well, to keep their own nature secret from the
conspiracy.

Even as the Seven Families leadership and NEMESIS plotted against each
other, and worked together, Koalidi was playing a triple game. He had
formed his own 'conspiracy', one well suited to his twisted mind. It
involved some of the scientists from his vast network of research
teams, a handful of his more decadent relatives, and a handful of
others. There were perhaps 50 of them, altogether, and they shared in
common high intelligence (the least able of them was quite bright),
considerable combined wealth and power (even setting aside Koalidi's
vast wealth), and decadent, twisted interests, with a profound dose of
sheer hatred toward Homosapient life. [1]

Koalidi and his private conspiracy were planning, in fact, to betray
both the Seven Families and their 'partners' (NEMESIS). For their
part, there were those among the Seven Families, recognizing how
unstable their leader was becoming, who had initiated plots of their
own against Koalidi.

Amid all these swirling plots and all this confusion, the first
broodwyrm came into being. Koalidi created it in the fertile uplands
north of the Maladaran capitol city, Malica. The soil of this area was
deep and rich, and the entire area was private property, easily
cleared and guarded against trespassers. Hundreds of M. tragicus
apes did the physical work, a handful of the most trusted and able of
the conspirators organized the activities.

This first broodwyrm grew rapidly as the resources of the Seven
Families were spent on it, bringing it to readiness. Koalidi
stimulated the formation of a brain-core, and as he had calculated,
the first broodwyrm 'woke up', becoming a sapient being. Koalidi had
planned for this eventuality, and he saw to it that he was the primary
influence on the instruction and conditioning of this mind, of which
he had already shaped the biological basis.

The first broodwyrm began to grow in 31,500 BC. The creature
'awakened' in 31,498 BC, when it was about 200 meters in diameter, and
still growing steadily as it was fed a nearly perfectly calculated
flow of nutrients and water (Plus oddments. The digestive chambers of
the broodwyrm were a perfect place to dispose of unneeded corpses,
including some of Koalidi's less fortunate sexual partners.). By
31,495, the creature had grown to a diameter of 800 meters, by 31,492
BC, when it finally slowed down its growth rate, it was roughly a mile
in diameter, and had developed over a million bionodes within itself,
as well as various other features.

Koalidi found the intellect that the creature developed to be his
perfect complement in certain ways. It was cold, precise, incredibly
powerful, and his efforts to shape it to match his own were largely
successful. It acted for the scientist much as a massively parallel
supercomputer would, far beyond the abilities of the TL10 technology
the Maladarans possessed, with the added advantages of living
imagination and sentient comprehension.

Using this ability, Koalidi was able to advance his own interests
within the Seven Families conspiracy, and the conspiracy's general
interests, enormously, but it was also the case that Koalidi was using
those abilities to make more private preparations. He and his
personal inner circle were planning something that would have been
considered insane, even by the eccentric standards of the Seven
Families, and the fantastic abilities of the broodwyrm made
implementing their insanity a viable option.

Quietly, Koalidi had begun using the broodwyrm and its intellect to
aid him in designing the templates for an entire new species of
sapient life. It would not be Homosentient, it would not even be a
member of any of the standard phyla, as Terrans would later define
them. Koalidi was making an army, an army of living fighting
machines, and also a new species that he intended to have supplant
Homosentient life.

His inner circle were all in on this. Many of them had the Fanaticism
disadvantage, with the focus of 'hates own kind'. The exact
motivations varied, but Koalidi had chosen his inner circle carefully.
All were firmly in agreement that the universe would be a better
place without Homosentient life in it. [2]

Many of them intended to suicide, once they could do so while taking
the rest of their genus with them.

NEMESIS, for its part, would have had no problem whatever with their
goal of exterminating Homosentience, of course. It shared precisely
that goal. But they did not share the goal of exterminating all
Solarigen life. Some of them in fact wanted to make Homosentients
extinct to protect the non-sapient species of Solarigen life. [2]

Further, while many of Koalidi's inner circle intended to die with
their respective species, some had other plans. As the wheels within
wheels turned, Koalidi himself and a few of his inner-inner circle
planned not to die, as they led their compatriots to believe, but to
transform themselves into members of the 'new race'. [3]

So matters stood, as the respective plans of NEMESIS, the Conspiracy,
Koalidi's outer-inner circle, his inner-inner circle, and others
swirled toward their culmination, and an unsuspecting Hegemony lived
out the final years before the greatest disaster in their history.

MORE LATER.


[1] Psychologically, this was the basis for much of Koalidi's sadistic
tendency, it was rooted in a basic detestation of his own genus, and
especially his own species.

[2] In short, their membership included some profoundly evil people,
and several who were barking mad, and some who were both, led by a
twisted supergenius. Many of them even realized they were mad. But
that did not stop them from trying to further their madness. It was
only the combination of Koalidi's native charisma and genius that held
them together long enough to do what they did.

[3] The plots swirling through these groups at that time were beyond
byzantine. I've only given a skeletal outline of the plots, schemes,
and plans and betrayals, attempted betrayals, and planned betrayals in
motion at the time.

NOTE: For information about the 'broodwyrms', see this page:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=70702

Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 06-20-2010 at 11:21 PM.
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Old 06-24-2010, 09:37 PM   #34
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

The actual design and creation of Koalidi's 'new race' was neither
swift nor easy, even with the resources of their broodwyrm to draw
upon. Though he and his teams had experience in modifying life
extensively, actually designed new forms of life almost from scratch
was rare. They had already done this, of course, in creating the
broodwyrm, but that project had taken a great many years of time and
effort on its own. This project was just as challenging in its way,
and furthermore required additional layers of secrecy from those of
his conspiratorial fellows that Koalidi planned to betray.

They experimented with various ideas, drawing inspiration and genetic
material from thousands of species, across many phyla. They 'grew'
test creatures in the bionodes of the broodwyrm, experimenting with
various combinations, and testing the creatures in secret. Bit by
bit, their efforts began to bear fruit, and the 'design template' for
their new species began to take shape.

The design work began in 31,290 BC. It was 31,268 when the first
generation of the new species finally took shape in the bionodes of
the broodwyrm. When this group, unlike the previous attempts, proved
to be adequate to all the tests and standards Koalidi and his team had
set, they knew they were ready to move to the next stage, and for
Koalidi it was none too soon, as he was now 113 years old.

While this was only the early stage of 'old age' for a H.
eostellaris
of Koalidi's culture, wealth, and tech level, he was
still acutely aware that time was passing. Thus, as soon as they had
created a bioform that could fulfill their requirements, they
proceeded to the next stage of the plan, somewhat faster than prudence
would in fact have indicated. Pressed by time, Koalidi feared both
that his life would end before they were ready, or that their
increasingly elaborate and energetic activities would give them away
before they were ready. Which might explain his uncharacteristic
hurry.

The first 'accceptable' batch of the new species numbered only a few
dozen. When they decided all was ready, Koalidi instructed the
broodwyrm to begin growing more individuals of the new species, and so
almost every bionode in the vast broodwyrm (or those of sufficient
size) began to produce the various 'castes' of the new species. Over
the course of a year, a species that had numbered 48 grew to number
well over one million. [1]

As soon as a member of the species had been 'decanted' from a bionode,
and the bionode had been allowed to rest and recover, a new organism
began to grow. It was mass-production applied to sapient life, and it
enabled Koalidi and his fellow inner circle members to 'grow' an army
from almost nothing at a fantastic rate. The payoff of long decades
of effort now came pouring in.

The new creatures began to organize into their 'society', guided by
the instincts they had been equipped with by their creators, and their
own intellects. As soon they felt the time had come, those of the
inner circle who had always planned to do so committed suicide,
confident that their creations would soon send their fellow
Homosentients after them. This group was for the msot part unaware
that Koalidi and his 'inner-inner circle' had chosen, instead of
death, transformation.

In specially modified bionodes, hidden deep within the innermost
recesses of the broodwyrm, Koalidi and his fellow innermost
conspirators were blissfully unconscious as their bodies were
disassembled, and their brains, spinal cords, selected elements of the
rest of their nervous systems, some of their endocrine systems, and a
few other bits of their natural forms were 'transplanted' into the new
bodies that were 'growing' around them living remnants of the former
Homosentients. It was a fantastically delicate process. The
broodwyrm could grow a new member of the species from scratch in a
couple of weeks, but to transform a living, functional Human or
Eostellarian into one of the new breed took nit-picking care,
moment-to-moment attention, and a long period of time, on the order of
a Terran year or more. Of the eleven people (six men and five women)
who chose to make the attempt, two died in the process in spite of the
best effort of the broodwyrm. But Koalidi survived, and emerged from
the bionode in the year 31,266 BC. He was no longer a Homosentient
being.

The new creatures Koalidi had created, and transformed himself into,
were unlike anything else in the animal kingdom, and indeed the
Kingdom Animalia would be the 'smallest' Linnaean classification
category they could share with our own genus. But then, since they
lacked an evolutionary history, the Linnaean System would be arguably
inapplicable to them, anyway.

They were eight-limbed, but they were not arthropods. They were
endothermic (sort of), but they were not mammals. They had skeletal
elements very similar to vertebrae, but their were not vertebrates,
nor even chordates. Though possessed of radial symmetry, they were
not echinoderms.

Three hundred centuries later, Terrans would almost universally come
to refer to these creatures collectively as the Beasties. Even
biological scientists would tend to use the term, which was quite
adequately precise given the unique nature of the creatures to which
it would refer. [2]

The new species was divided into various castes, like social insects,
but most of the castes were fully sapient. The specialized versions
of the creatures into which Koalidi and his fellows had been
transformed were 'overlord' caste, and the other Beasties were
instinctively deferential to them, from optical, pheromonal, and
psionic cues. In most situations, any Beastie would obey an overlord
Beastie without question, even at the cost its own life.

More will be said of the Beasties later, in greater detail. Suffice
it to say here that the Beasties were superbly effective living
sapient fighting machines, they were instinctive team fighters, and
they had a literally instinctive, pre-programmed hostility toward all
species of Homosentient life. It was an irrational, visceral impulse
that operated below the level of conscious thought.

Koalidi no longer had to worry in any near term about his lifespan.
His overlord form could last for centuries, and specialized features
of it could sustain his brain and other human remnants just as long.
Now he could pour his efforts into his plans, and he did so, the
numbers of Beasties swelling as the broodwyrm manufactured more and
more, and the Beasties themselves began to breed, bringing forth life
after their own kind.

Around the underground broodwyrm grew an additional labyrinth of
tunnels and caverns, in which the Beasties spread out as new creatures
were 'birthed'. In quiet secrecy, small groups of Beasties were sent to
other sites on Maladara, there to lay the groundwork for the next
stage. The broodwyrm, fully loyal to Koalidi, aided him in deceiving
his former associates among the Seven Families into believing that he
had died in an accident. When human visitors from the conspiracy
visited the broodwyrm site, they were guided through the tunnels and
living passages, the Beasties kept out of site, and told only what
Koalidi wanted them to know. Any that somehow learned too much tended
to become a meal for a Beastie.

Meanwhile, the NEMESIS-budding that had been manipulating Koalidi was
puzzled. It wished it could contact its parent entity for
instructions, but it could not safely do so. All it knew (through its
robots) was that its prize pawn, Koalidi, had apparently died in a
rather suspicious accident. The circumstances seemed a little too
convenient to the budding, but it could learn nothing definite. It
kept its electronic eyes and ears open, but continued with the overall
plan as best it could, still hoping to foment an intra-Hegemonic war.

In that, its hopes would be completely fulfilled, but not in the way
it (or NEMESIS the parent entity) would have chosen.

Koalidi knew he did not have limitless time. As the numbers of
Beasties swelled and the preparations were laid, the chances of
accidental discovery rose steadily. Koalidi had to compromise the
need for speed with the need for complete preparations, and in the
end, he might have miscalculated slightly, striking a bit before he
was ready. Perhaps, just perhaps, that changed the course of
Homosapient history.

Be that as it might be, the day came, in a year Terrans would call
31,257 BC, when Koalidi felt that the balance was sufficient, and that
further delay for additional preparation would not be worth the added
risk of discovery. Thus it was that on a warm spring day in the
Maladaran capitol city of Malica, the average person on the street got
their first look at the Beasties, in a day that would live in Eosian
nightmares for centuries afterward.

MORE LATER.


[1] Koalidi had long prepared for this day, and the broodwyrm was well
stocked with the necessary nutrients and raw materials to work at full
capacity. Even so, it consumed them at a tremendous rate in creating
the new species.

[2] The name would come to apply from its use in the 'Scots Prayer':
"From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, and things that
go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!" The circumstances of
the first contact between Terrans and Beasties, and the nature of the
Beasties, brought that to mind in one of the survivors of the
encounter, and the name stuck.
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Old 07-04-2010, 02:12 PM   #35
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

The city of Malica was constructed on the southern coast of one of the
many island-continents of the planet. It was, in fact, built into the
walls of a vast valley, a round bowl with an opening to the sea on the
southern side, flooding the lower part of the nearly circular valley. [1]

The relatively steep rocky walls of the capitol were covered in
structures, and a vast network of tunnels, galleries, and chambers had
been cut into the rock behind the upper levels. At water-level, a
circular harbor existed that made the capitol city both a center of
administration and a center of trade, commerce and industry. It was
in many ways a superb site for a city, sheltered from the elements,
with easy access to the sea and plenty of space. The city was cut
into dozens of levels, and spilled over the edge of the bowl to spread
out over the surrounding 'grasslands. [2]

Even by Maladaran standards, Malica was warm. It was on the northern
edge of the tropic zone, and for practical purposes there were two
seasons, the mild season and the hot season. On the day that Koalidi
began his open attack, the mild season was passing into the hot, and
it was one of the most beautiful days in living memory in Malica.
There was a mild sea breeze playing through the bowl of the city, the
sky was a perfect cloudless blue, and the tourist season was just
shifting into full speed.

All this made the sudden chaos the more surreal.

Those who survived to tell the tale told various versions of what they
saw and heard, but the consensus was that one moment, all was calm.
The next moment, monsters were pouring through the tunnels and
chambers, roaming through the streets, and reducing the perfectly
maintained calm of Malica into a nightmare.

The Beasties were wearing heavy armor, and armed with blastrifles and
lasers and guns. They seemed to be everywhere at once, and more and
more kept pouring in from wherever they had been. They achieved
complete strategic and tactical surprise, and the slaughter was beyond
description. The Beasties showed no sign of interest in anything but
murder, opening fire on everyone without discrimination or hesitation.

The only actual protective force the capitol city could boast was the
Malican police force, which was adequate for keeping order in the
city, but not even remotely a military organization. Caught by
surprise, lightly armed and lacking any serious armor or support, they
could do little but die alongside the civilians they were powerless to
protect.

Of course, it was not just Malica. The attack started there, but
within minutes similar outbreaks were occuring all over Maladara.
Koalidi was no military man, but he was not stupid, and his initial
strikes were calculated to break up communication and organization.
He was very successful, overall. In Malica, the Beasties overwhelmed
and destroyed the telepathic communications center that was the only
real-time means of interstellar communication available to the
Hegemony, and they destroyed the headquarters of the Maladaran police
forces and planetary military organization (such as it was).

There is little way to describe the horror of those first hours of the
attack. In Malica alone, nearly 50% of the 40 million inhabitants
were killed over the course of twelve hours. Similar levels of carnage
occurred in other major cities and population centers, all over the
planet. The Beasties were well-prepared, had the advantage of
surprise, and were utterly ruthless.

Naturally, there was resistance. As the nightmare unfolded, those
Homosentients who escaped the initial slaughter began trying to fight
back. They had little in the way of weapons and less armor, but there
were millions upon millions of them. The Beasties had not been able
to breed up to that level, because it would have made it too hard to
maintain secrecy, so the Homosentients still had a mild advantage of
numbers. The Homosentients were disorganized, terrified, and
confused, but as they started to fight back the Beasties began to take
loses. Lacking serious weapons, some Homosentients improvised,
converting TL10 industrial equipment and vehicles into weapons.

There were a few armories on Maladara. The Maladaran government had
possessed a small army, but most of the arsenals proved to be in
Beastie 'hands'. A few were missed or liberated, but not many.
Indeed, the Beasties proved to have fantastically accurate
intelligence, not only about the government but about the various
private organizations and individuals who might have had resources
useful against the Beasties. In many places, professional security
personnel tried to gain access to their own weapons stocks, only to
find them empty or boobytrapped. The entire membership of the
Maladaran governing legislature was killed in the first few hours, the
secret bunkers and secure hiding places all having been revealed by
the mysterious intelligence source that the Beasties were using. The
government was effectively 'decapitated'.

The Beasties seemed to be everywhere. Even in space, in orbital
habitats and space stations and forward bases, the Beasties suddenly
appeared.

Maladara's major spaceports were primary Beastie targets, and so
effective was their initial assault that all the major ports fell in
the first 24 hours. The few ships that managed to lift clear were
shot down, as it proved that the Beasties were in possession of
batteries of orbital anti-spacecraft weaponry, ready to cut off the
escape of any spacecraft that broke free of the surface.

Koalidi achieved his primary goals, that first horrible day. The
Beasties had managed to seize control of or destroy the ships that
could have carried word of the attack away from Maladara, and they had
destroyed the psi-com station that could have flashed a warning in
zero-time to the other worlds of the Hegemony. The government was
shattered, the cities on fire, the streets and corridors choked with
corpses, the few military installations destroyed or occupied.

The Beasties were only marginally in control of the planet Maladara,
though. The Beasties numbered in the millions, but not the tens of
millions, and they were still (overall) outnumbered by the
Homosentient population. Many areas of the planet were still under
human control, if only because there were not enough Beasties to
strike everywhere at once.

Further, in space, the outcome had been less clear. On the moons, the
Beasties had captured or destroyed the few bases on Transik and had
taken some of the larger facilities and cities on Belastron. On
Coran, the innermost moon, the Beasties had been largely defeated.
Luck played a significant role there, it so happened that there was a
Hegemony warship docked in the largest base there, paying a courtesy
call on the Maladarans. The Beasties managed to disable to ship,
rendering it useless for starflight, but its crew opened their
armories, armed the locals, and led a counterassault that drove the
Beasties back and wiped out the relatively small Beastie force. With
the heavy weapons from the starship and the advantage of control of
the moon's communications and transport system, they were able to
break the Beastie hold on the other cities of that moon, as well.

Elsewhere in the Malus System, other enclaves of Homosentients had
managed to defeat their attackers, or had not been attacked, being
deemed too low a priority by Koalidi and his inner circles.
Unfortunately, none of these groups had access to working starships.

MORE LATER.


[1] This was in fact a meteor crater, relatively young on geological
terms, which left a circular valley six miles in diameter in what was
originally a continental upland. When the planet entered its 'hot and
wet' climatic stage, the rising sea levels rose up over the lowlands
to stop just short of the upland, and flooded into the crater through
a collapsed gap.

[2] It was actually a Maladaran relative of Terran grasses, but it was
close enough.

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Old 07-04-2010, 02:26 PM   #36
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

What followed over the next Terran year was a chaos. The Beasties, in
control of the major cities and centers of Maladara and some of the
off-planet centers, began to breed in earnest, and launched an ongoing
assault on the remaining resisting Homosentients. They held most of
the cards, but the defenders had a few advantages. Koalidi had struck
a couple of years before the ideal moment.

The very ruthlessness of the Beasties was an advantage for the
resistance, in one sense. After they broke resistance in the cities,
the Beasties then did what came naturally to them. As the stories got
out that there was no surrendering, the resistance was stiffened. The
horrible stories (backed up with pictures and other data!) of the
Beasties torturing and eating the dead and wounded and captured
Homosentients was the ultimate propaganda, having the added advantage
of being pure truth.

The resistance was initially sporadic and chaotic, but bit by bit,
some organization emerged. A high-ranking young aristocrat who had
survived the slaughter of his family emerged as a rallying point. He
was only 22, but he proved to be bright and charismatic, and willing
to learn from others and his own experiences. He also had a stroke of
luck in his primary lieutenant.

This was a vacationing military officer from a different world, a
planet called Trakora. Trakora was an H. sapiens world that had
been wracked by warfare between various sovereignties for centuries,
but that meant that its military personnel had plentiful practical
experience. It had been sheer coincidence that he was on Maladara at
the time of the attack, he was vacationing, on leave from his world
during a period of relative calm. It was this officer, a 50 year old
with experience in insurgent and open warfare, who became the chief
adviser and field commander for the growing Maladaran resistance. His
practical experience proved invaluable, since he was the only high
ranking leader on either side who had actual, practical experience in
warfare.

The resistance had a basic goal of getting word out to the rest of the
Hegemony of what was happening on Maladara, and of finding some way,
any way, of breaking the Beastie hold on the planet. The fighting
that followed was classic guerrilla warfare, with fearful loses for
the resistance, but they learned.

The fact that Homosentients retained control of the innermost moon,
Coran, proved to be a major headache for the Beasties. The lesser
problem was that the resistance was supported by periodic fire from
improvised heavy weapons, and the people on Coran could also provide
intelligence and communications resources to the resistance.
Furthermore, the weapons of Coran kept the Beasties from having full
'space control'.

The greater problem, from the point of view of the Beasties, was that
Hegemonic Navy warship that they had disabled on Coran. They had
rendered it unable to escape, but its presence screwed up many plans,
because sooner or later, its absence was sure to be noted by the
Hegemonic authorities.

Koalidi knew that he had a little time. The simple fact that the
telepathic connection had been broken could have many explanations.
It would take some time before the absence of ships coming from or
returning from Maladara would begin to seem suspicious. Any ship
approaching Maladara or even entering the Malus System was destroyed.

However, Koalidi also knew that it was only a matter of time before
somebody noticed that no ship was coming from or returning from the
Malus System, and eventually the telepathic silence would become
suspicious. Koalidi also worried about a real but hard to quantify
risk: the always present chance that some high-Power ESPer somewhere
in the Hegemony would sense something about what was happening. The
transformed genius considered that a low risk, but he could not rule
it out, and he could not really quantify it.

In light of that, Koalidi had no intention of waiting. Even as his
Beasties still struggled to suppress an ever-more-entrenched
resistance all over Maladara, Koalidi was starting the next phase of
his plan. Even before he had launched his sneak attack, Koalidi had
sent out infiltration groups aboard outgoing starships, consisting of
a handful of warrior/breeder Beasties along with hundreds of eggs
stored in cryogenic capsules. The Beasties would hide in the works of
the ships, and reaching other major Hegemony worlds, they would go to
ground, implant their eggs, and start breeding. They had strict
orders to stay hidden until they received the 'go' order from Koalidi.

This had started years before the actual attack, and Koalidi knew that
if all had gone according to plan, there were cells of Beasties
waiting for his order on dozens of planets. He had confirmation that
several were ready, even before he launched his attack. Knowing that
time was now of the essence, Koalidi sent out Beasties on the captured
starships, who transmitted a pre-arranged signal as soon as they
closed within FTL transmission range of the targeted worlds.

The signals were always highly compressed, on little-used frequencies.
Each planet that had a successful Beastie cell, upon receiving the
signal, found itself facing a miniature version of the horrors that
had befallen Maladara itself. The selected worlds were mostly
low-population, high-value targets rich in resources and strategically
located. It was in these attacks that the Hegemony at large
discovered what had started on Maladara two Terran years earlier.

Since their numbers were smaller, Beastie victory was less sure on
these worlds, and in some cases the locals succeeded in driving back
the monsters. Word got out, and the Hegemonic authorities found
themselves faced with an attack by mysterious creatures of unknown
origin, on worlds scattered across the Hegemony, with no obvious
pattern (Koalidi wanted to distract attention from Maladara, not draw
it in). Some of the targeted worlds were in fact been on the far side
of the Hegemony from Maladara.

But even these attacks were in the nature of a diversion, Koalidi knew
that such isolated groups almost surely would be defeated. But along
with the damage they managed to inflict, they were instructed to
select a good location, and there start the growth of a broodwyrm
in secret, with a handful of Beasties to guard it. This was the 'ticking
time bomb' element of Koalidi's plan.

But Koalidi did not have everything his own way. About that...

MORE LATER.

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Old 07-04-2010, 05:00 PM   #37
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

There were some other players in the game, that neither the Beasties
nor the defending Homosentients knew about. One was the Supervisor
unit, the device placed on Maladara by NEMESIS to supervise the
activities there. It had, without intending to, played a major role
in the creation of the Beasties, but it had never realized that it was
doing any such thing, since Koalidi had hidden his secret agenda so
well.

The Supervisor was caught just as much by surprise as the Maladarans
when the Beasties emerged from hiding to launch their attack. Its
Infiltrator robots saw and heard it all, of course, mixed as they were
among the population, but the Supervisor had no more idea than anybody
else of what was going on.

Unlike the Homosentients, however, the Supervisor was not immediately
threatened, and was incapable of being intimidated anyway. Within the
first few hours of the attack, the Infiltrators had received new
orders, to capture one of the unknown creatures. Thus it was that a
Beastie which strayed from its formation found itself pursuing several
Homosentients into a cul-de-sac. As soon as they were cut off from
line of sight and sound, the 'victims' suddenly proved to be
impossibly fast and strong. What the Beastie had taken for prey were
actually Infiltrators, and it was little difficulty for six
Infiltrator robots to overcome one Beastie.

The dead Beastie was then taken to an isolated place, and subjected to
an autopsy and general analysis, and through the optical and audial
sensors of the Infiltrators, the Supervisor analyzed the creature. It
already had access to a vast library of information about Solarigen
biology, anatomy, and evolutionary history, and as it compared the
creature to its files, the nemetic brain's reaction was as close as it
could come to 'what the hell?!'.

Three spines separated at 120 degrees, a circular digestive tract that
used the same opening for ingestion and waste elimination, eight
limbs, a thin layer of insulating fur, radial symmetry, two brains,
etc. It made no biological sense whatsoever, and there were millions
more of them suddenly crawling all over the planet, with no obvious
origin or source.

Under the circumstances, the Supervisor decided the situation
justified taking the risk of 'breaking silence', and contact NEMESIS
itself. A few days after the attack started, a spacecraft launched
from a remote part of Maladara. This had been happening regularly as
refugees with access to small spacecraft made attempts at escape, and
always they were shot down by the orbital weapons the Beasties
controlled. This one appeared to meet the same fate.

But in fact a smaller pod had launched from the ship just before the
particle beam destroyed the larger vehicle. The pod swung in a slow
orbit until it intercepted a spacecraft, disguised as meteoric junk.
That ship in turn made a quiet escape from the Malus System, heading
across the Galaxy toward the distant planetoid within which NEMESIS
brooded.

The escape ship risked using high-drive, and so it was only a month or
so before NEMESIS was examining the remains of several captured
Beasties, both Warrior and Worker castes. The ancient murder-machine
examined them almost down to the molecular level, and its overall
reaction could be summed up as 'what the hell?!', or as close to such
a reaction of emotional shock as it could approach.

Having watched the evolution of metazoan life all over the Galaxy, for
half a billion years, NEMESIS knew even better than its tiny offshoot
just how bizarrely improbable the Beasties really were. The chance of
such a creature appearing by convergence was too low for NEMESIS to
even bother calculating it. Yet it was equally improbable that it
evolved from any known genetic line.

NEMESIS rapidly realized that the Beasties essentially had to be
artificial. Correlating with the reports the Supervisor had sent
along about what had been happening on Maladara, NEMESIS was able to
calculate a fairly accurate picture of what had to have happened, if
not why. But even as it was considering the implications, reports
began to come in from its spies elsewhere in the Hegemony of Beastie
attacks on other worlds. NEMESIS realized that it was facing massive
'blowback' from its plans, which had mutated far beyond their original
form.

NEMESIS found itself at a disadvantage in reacting, though, because of
the sheer speed at which events were unfolding. In the time it took
for a messenger to move back and forth from NEMESIS to a Hegemony
world, the entire situation could change beyond recognition. A game
in which a brief gambit had at one time taken at least 50,000 years
was now measured in days and weeks and months.

Meanwhile, the Hegemony was reeling. The Hegemonic Navy found itself
facing exploding military outbreaks on dozens of worlds, an apparent
attack by a totally unfamiliar sapient species. The Navy was
professional and well-trained, but quite small, and spread thin across
over 14,000 worlds. As fast as one outbreak was suppressed, usually
by local forces backed up by spatial bombardment, a new report came
in. The Beasties seemed to be everywhere, and there appeared to be
no trace of any origin or source for them.

The Navy spent a great deal of time and effort trying to determine the
point of origin of the creatures, which they naturally took to be
aliens. This was sensible, as far as they knew, if there was a
central world or worlds and they could find it, they might conceivably
take the battle to them, forcing them to fight on their own territory
to free up pressure on the Hegemony worlds. But even when they
captured Beasties for interrogation, little was learned. They tended
to die under interrogation, and often in ways that brought about the
deaths of several of their captors in the process. [1] [2]

Naturally, the continuing silence from Maladara was noticed, but under
the circumstances, it was ascribed to being a likely result of Beastie
attack, as it was far from the only world that had fallen silent now.
[3]

In all the chaos and confusion, things that should have seemed obvious
were easily missed. The Hegemony fought to regain control, and as a
result of the confusion Koalidi received the delay he wanted. It
would be over 5 years before the various incursions could be fully
suppressed and enough new starships built that the Navy could afford
to send a ship to see what had happened at Maladara, along with
expeditions to several other worlds that had fallen silent.

The ship that was sent to Maladara did not return.

The other ships mostly did, and as communications were restored among
the attacked worlds, the Navy had the resources to spare to send a
larger force, five starships including a heavy battlecruiser.

The expedition did not return.

By now, suspicions were seriously aroused, and the Navy began
preparations to mount a major expedition to Malus System, with several
battlecruisers and supporting ships, but before it could leave, a
situation that had seemed under control suddenly came apart, as
spacecraft of unfamiliar designed, crewed by Beasties, suddenly
appeared in the skies of hundreds of Hegemonic worlds.

This was a shock, in its way, because in the previous battles, the
Beasties had been confined to planetary surfaces, or captured human
vessels, nobody had ever discovered how the Beasties were crossing
space on their own. Now the Navy, which had up until now had the
'high ground' in its engagements, found themselves faced with forces
as capable in space as they themselves. The Beastie Wars had now
begun in earnest. [4]

MORE LATER.

[1] The Beasties on the other worlds themselves did not know where
they came from, they were hatched from eggs brought from Maladara and
intentionally kept ignorant by the handful of Beasties that raised
them.

[2] A favorite Beastie tactic was to use a well-disguised implanted
explosive device, which enabled them to suicide very spectacularly
when useful. They sometimes used other tricks as well.

[3] Which theory was close to the truth.

[4] What had happened, of course, was that while the initial
infiltration groups had kept the Hegemony occupied, Koalidi had been
breeding Beasties by the million, and constructing spacecraft with
captured shipyards at Maladara. The ships were not as different from
Homosentient designs as they first appeared, much of it was cosmetic.
But it added to the confusion.

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Old 07-04-2010, 05:08 PM   #38
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

In Terran terms, the Final War that brought down the Hegemony could
probably be dated to the appearance of the Beastie space fleets, which
would have been in the year 31,250 BC. The Eosians found themselves
fighting a genocidal war for their very survival, against an enemy
whose numbers and resources seemed to be nearly limitless, even if
their tactical abilities and intelligence seemed to be less than they
might be. [1]

The first rounds of the Final War took over 20 Terran years. These
struggles finally trailed off between 31,230 and 31,228 BC, as the
immensely expanded Navy finally managed to get ahead of their enemy.
The Homosentients blasted out nests and bases faster even than the
Beasties could breed and build, often resorting to dire measures to do
so. Koalidi admitted to himself, as he finally realized that the
great assault had failed, that he had underestimated both the
resources and ruthlessness of his former genus.

Unfortunately for the Hegemony, the Beasties were still firmly in
control of a huge array of worlds, and if they had been forced to
cease their offensives, they were sufficiently entrenched that the
Hegemony could not drive them back from their conquered worlds,
either.

Over three trillion Homosentients, military and civilian, had been
killed. All too many had been literally eaten alive. Entire worlds
had been devastated, whole fleets of starships blasted to vapor or
boiled to liquid. The ecospheres of many worlds had been damaged,
some of them to the point of near mass-extinction level. The
Hegemonic economy was strained to the breaking point, and the result
of all the horror was inconclusive.

At one point, late in the first round of the Final War (specifically
in 31,233 BC), a large Hegemonic force managed to smash its way into
the Malus System, since by this point it was clear that whatever was
happening had something important to do with Maladara. They didn't
manage to land. They were driven back with heavy losses, but they
managed to get a good look at the planet before they did, and they
were stunned at the transformation of that former living jewel.
Maladara bore little resemblance to what it had been only decades
agone.

One of the ships was so heavily damaged that it was forced to
crash-land on Maladara itself. The others were either totally
destroyed or forced to make a fighting retreat. None of them, even
the heavy superbattleships, got away untouched. But what they had
seen and scanned was so incredible that it was regarded as worthwhile
cost in terms of intelligence.

But about what had happened on Maladara...

MORE LATER.

[1] Their resources were not quite as large as they managed to make it
seem, and their tactical limits derived in part from the fact that the
'founders' of their species were not military men. They had to learn
the hard way, and they did. As for their intelligence, Beasties did
average a bit less intelligent than most Homosentient species, but
they had their bright members, and they were quite bright enough to be
a deadly threat.

Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 07-04-2010 at 05:45 PM.
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Old 07-04-2010, 06:01 PM   #39
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

The expedition that arrived in the Malus System in 31,233 BC consisted
of two of the heaviest class of spatial battlewagons in the Hegemonic
Navy, backed up by over a dozen lesser craft. It had become clear by
this point, from the rare captured and interrogated Beastie, from
analysis of traffic patterns, and logical deduction, that the Beastie
menace was in some important way associated with the planet Maladara,
which had been one of the first Hegemonic worlds to fall silent at the
start of the war.

The thinking in Naval Command was that Maladara had been attacked
first, and formed a sort of forward base for the aliens. This theory
was the most popular among the strategists because it seemed simplest,
though Maladara was oddly located to be the first choice of an
invading species as a base. [1]

What the expedition discovered when they entered the Malus System,
dropping down to sublight velocities in the star's gravity well, was
that they had entered a nearly inescapable trap. The ships had barely
come within active scanning range of Maladara when they found
themselves under heavy particle-beam and laser fire from space-based
weaponry of enormous power. In the ensuing combat, the expedition was
worn away, and eventually only one of the two superbattleships and
three of the supporting vessels managed to make a fighting escape,
heavily damaged and with extensive casualties and losses.

One battlecruiser had its dimensionators too heavily damaged to have
any chance of making an interstellar voyage, but otherwise remained
combat capable. The crew realized their only real hope was to reach
the surface of Maladara, and they proceeded to try the nearly hopeless
task of reaching the planet itself. It was made possible only by the
fact that the Beasties expected them to try something else, giving
them a brief window of opportunity.

They eventually managed it by shutting down almost every system,
leaving their vessel looking as if it were dead in space. Their
orbital path looked as if it would bring them on a near-pass to the
planet, but the Beasties mistook the ship for being dead, and when
they calculated it would miss the planet they paid it little more
attention.

It took over a month to make an unpowered orbital approach to
Maladara. Unable to activate most of the shipboard systems for fear
of detection, the surviving crew kept warm by means of the tiny
heating units from their battlesuits, ate cold rations, and used their
life-support systems at the lowest activity they could manage to keep
their shipboard air and water supply just barely breathable and
potable. It was a miserable experience, and several of the wounded
died during the terrifying wait, everyone aboard fearing detection
every moment as Maladara slowly grew in the viewports.

The only thing that enabled the desperate ploy to work was that the
shipboard main power plants were still ticking over, looking as if the
reactor were merely spinning down on their own after the damage the
ship had taken. The hard radiation made it just possible to hide the
minimal power usage that kept the crew alive, even though it also
meant that they were getting a dangerous dose of ionizing radiation
from their power plant at the same time. [2]

The last stage was the most dangerous. As the ship drew near the time
of closest approach to Maladara, they had to alter its path just
enough to intersect the planet, and they had to do so fast enough to
avoid being detected and destroyed and slowly enough to avoid a burnup
in the atmosphere. They managed it by the dangerous expedient of
venting most of their reserve air supply to apply a slight course
alteration. It was subtle enough that it looked as if it could be an
ordinary malfunction of a damage wreck.

It worked, the Beasties paid the altered course little attention, as
it was still on track to miss the planet (barely). But it let them
get close enough to use the ship's engines, at the last moment, to
steer the cruiser into the atmosphere of Maladara. When they saw that
the ship had made this change, the Beasties realized it was still
under control (for some definitions of control), and opened fire with
their orbital weapons. But the ship went down fast, and by the time
the Beasties were fully aware of it, they had reached the surface.

The surviving crew scattered, knowing the enemy would rapidly bear
down on the site of the crashed vehicle, and most of them perished
within days, on a transformed planet occupied by the largest number of
Beasties of any planet in Hegemonic space. But a few managed to
survive, and eventually made contact with the remaining Resistance
movement on Maladara. [3]

The planet had appeared strange even from space. Before the Beastie
War had begun, Maladara had physically been one of the jewels of the
Hegemony, one of the richest and most clement worlds known. This had
been true only a few decades earlier.

By the time the expedition reached Malus System in 31,233 BC, what had
been a blue-green globe, swirled with clouds and marked by 24
island-continents, had been transformed. The clouds remained, thicker
than before, but the huge islands had turned grayish-black at the
fringes, and a dark-colored fringe extended out to sea around each
island. When more than one island was part of a partly submerged
continent, the 'fringe' could reach all the way from one island to
another, stretching across hundreds of linear miles of open shallow
sea.

The sensor readings had revealed that Maladara, always a warm world,
was not very hot, the average temperature range now running from 90 to
100 to 120. Thermal expansion had raised sea level, and the
composition of the atmosphere appeared to have subtly changed as well.

On the ground, the survivors found that the transformation was even
more radical than it had appeared. The entire biosphere was different
than it had been only 25 Terran years earlier. When the survivors
made contact with the Resistance, they discovered the full bizarre
tale.

After the initial Beastie outbreak on Maladara, the Resistance had
gradually come together, and for a time the struggle had been in
doubt. The Homosentients held one of Maladara's three moons, much of
the interior land of the island continents, and they had an edge in
numbers against the Beasties. The Beasties held most of the cities
(or the ruins thereof), most of the major communication and industrial
resources, and controlled the sky. But the Resistance had managed to
inflict a great deal of damage to the Beasties, and they even managed
to retake some of the resources they needed for the struggle.

But the Beasties kept coming, and coming, and coming. On their own,
the Beasties could breed faster than any Homosentient species, even
H. sapiens, and the broodwyrm Koalidi had created could turn out new
waves of the monsters in batches of half a million at a time, and it
produce several such batches over the course of a Terran year.
Inexorably, the advantage of numbers had turned in favor of the
Beasties.

Further, in those early years when the Homosentients held a numerical
advantage, the Beasties seemed somehow to know everything about what
was happening, with unbelievable knowledge of every nook and cranny of
Maladara. Eventually, the Resistance learned the truth: in his
still-Homosentient youth, Koalidi had refined the techniques they used
to control their servant-apes, M. tragicus, and at that same time,
he had converted them into spies. Every Tragic Ape had been a spy,
and they were everywhere on Maladara.

By five years after the Beastie outbreak in 31,257 BC, the Resistance
had been losing ground on all sides, and the Beasties had firm space
control, including all three moons. It was at about that time that
the Resistance, which had learned of the existence and general nature
of the broodwyrm, learned to their horror that the Beasties had
brought additional broodwyrms to functional status, all over Maladara.

This made the Beastie numerical advantage all but insurmountable, and
opened up new avenues for the Beasties to strike at their enemies and
still have resources to spare to expand their efforts off-world.

MORE LATER.

[1] There was a divide regarding the Beasties that split the military,
the civilian government(s), and the scientific community of the
Hegemony. The majority believed the Beasties to be an alien sapient
species that attacked from an outside origin. A minority was
convinced that these creatures could not possibily have evolved
naturally, and that they had to be artificial creations of
Homosentients. (The majority of the biological scientists tended to
favor the artificial theory.) But others countered that creating the
Beasties was beyond the TL10 abilities of Homosentient society (and it
was), while the Beastie tech was clearly TL10, so they had to be
natural.

[2] Luckily for the crew, most Hegemonic Navy personnel were subjected
to treatments that somewhat increased resistance to radiation. It
kept them alive during their long wait.

[3] The efforts of the crash survivors, up to and including contact
with the Resistance, would make a story in itself. I may tell it,
eventually.
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Old 07-04-2010, 06:09 PM   #40
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The Eosians...

LATER.

Along with the Beasties, other new forms of life began to appear,
produced in the bionodes of the broodwyrms. The animal forms were
dangerous, and in many cases horrific. But it was the new kinds of
plant life that were transforming the planetary biosphere. The most
common example of that was the _darkmoss_, an artificial plant form
that was carefully engineered for a supremely efficient photosynthetic
ability. It was a dark green, almost black, in color, and could
convert sunlight and nutrients into living matter with an efficiency
greater than that of any known natural plant. It had a complex
fractal structure that enabled it to capture light with phenomenal
efficiency, maximizing surface area for a given area of land or sea.

The darkmoss came in various forms. One form spread out across the
surface of the shallow seas of Maladara, extending tendrils to draw in
nutrients from the depths and spreading out to collect immense amounts
of sunlight. Another form spread on land, covering hillsides, plains,
choking out forests and grasslands, giving the lands the dark color
that was now visible from space. So much photosynthetic activity was
underway through the darkmoss that the oxygen content of the planetary
atmosphere had risen measurably in only two decades.

The purpose of the darkmoss was to produce sufficient organic material
to feed the gargantuan appetites of the growing number of broodwyrms.
Even those incredible entities could not manufacture new monsters
without raw material, and the darkmoss was the primary source of that
raw material.

The darkmoss had decreased the planetary albedo, and even allowing for
the increased amount of solar energy stored as chemical energy, the
result was that the planet had warmed. If it had not been for the
fact that CO2 levels had been noticeably reduced by the darkmoss, the
heating would have been even worse.

In those areas not choked with darkmoss, other new plant and animal
forms were spreading, and the native forms were adapting as best they
could. The interior land of the island-continents were increasingly
jungle-choked, and it was in these regions that the remaining
Resistance activity was focused, since here, sheltered by dense
jungle, they could still partly evade the Beasties that swarmed all
over the coastlands. Even in the interior highlands, existence was
hard, and the Resistance was facing defeat and extermination over the
long term.

The Resistance had worked prodigies in their struggle. They had
constructed hidden laboratories and factories, underground or
otherwise hidden. They had found weaknesses in the Beasties that the
Hegemonic Navy had never discovered in 20 years of warfare. They had
even managed, occasionally, to kill entire broodwyrms. But they were
gradually losing the struggle, and they knew it.

The surviving Naval personnel rapidly realized that the local
knowledge the Maladaran Resistance had access to could be the greatest
intelligence coup in the entire course of the war. The Resistance had
learned that the Beasties were artificial, they knew quite a bit about
their origin, and they even knew the specific identity of Koalidi, the
creator of the Beasties. The handful of survivors from the crashed
Navy ship learned more useful intelligence about the enemy in the
months after they contacted the Resistance than the Hegemony had
learned in decades of war. They knew they had to somehow get that
information back to the Navy, but they were at a loss as to how to do
so.

In over 20 years, the Resistance had never gotten close to being able
to send any messages outside the Malus System. They had no access to
interstellar vessels, no telepaths of sufficient power to operate a
psi-com, and no psi-com.

What followed was one of the most desperate gambits the Resistance
ever tried. There were starships on Maladara, all of them in
Beastie 'hands'. They were designed in such a way that it was almost
impossible for a Homosentient to operate them, the controls being
adapted to Beastie manipulators. But the Resistance had studied the
Beasties for many years, and they knew that a Beastie could, in
theory, be almost totally controlled if one knew the appropriate
chemical and other 'triggers'. The Resistance had even captured and
partly 'controlled' Beasties using such techniques. In a desperate
gambit, the Resistance and its Naval allies launched a raid right in
the midst of a Beastie spaceport, with the goal of seizing starships.

It was fearfully costly for the Resistance. They lost hundreds of
fighters that they could not spare, including some of their best, most
experienced and capable personnel. Of the twenty Navy men with with
them, 13 were killed in the raid. But against all odds, the raid
succeeded in capturing six vessels, which escaped into space with tiny
crews of Homosentients and 'controlled' Beasties. As they made their
escape, other Resistance personnel, at fearful cost, managed to
interfere with enemy communications and command and control, giving
the ships a chance to get clear before the Beasties in control of the
heavy weapons could shoot them down. Of the six ships, four made it
far enough out to escape destruction before the Beasties controlling
the orbital arrays realized what was happening. At the cost of
hundreds of lives, 18 Homosentients escaped, using perhaps 40
pheromone-dominated Beasties as press crews for their spaceships.

Even after escaping the Malus System, they faced a difficult voyage,
in control of a crew that would kill them and eat them if their guard
slipped for an instant. The ships were basically translight-shuttles,
designed for a larger crew than they had, with limited provision. Of
the four ships that made it clear of the Malus System, only two
finally managed to reached Hegemony space. One ship was destroyed by
a technical problem, on the other the Beasties slipped the leash' and
killed the Homosentients, though one of the later managed to destroy
the ship rather than let the enemy retake it.

But the other two ships did finally reach a Naval Base, bringing with
them the most valuable intelligence information that had been found in
the whole course of the war.

It was 31,227 BC when the survivors reached sanctuary, and the active
combat had mostly ceased, with each side too exhausted to launch an
offensive, both sides strong enough hold on to what they held, both
sides rebuilding as fast as they could manage, both sides hobbled by
economies shredded and overstrained by decades of high-tech warfare
and deliberate assaults on each other's industrial and technical
infrastructures.

At the start of the Beastie War, some 23 Terran years earlier, the
Hegemony had counted well over 14,000 inhabited worlds in its domains.
Now the Homosentients still held a bit over 9,000 worlds, the
Beasties had firm control of 3300 worlds, with the remainder either
contested with ongoing local warfare or cut off from all contact,
current status unknown. With over three trillion Homosentients dead
and the economy bled white, many in the Hegemony felt as if things
could not possibly get worse.

They were wrong. But about that...

MORE LATER.
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