06-20-2010, 12:45 PM | #31 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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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. |
06-20-2010, 08:35 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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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:
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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06-20-2010, 08:41 PM | #33 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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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. |
06-24-2010, 09:37 PM | #34 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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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. |
07-04-2010, 02:12 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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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. Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 07-04-2010 at 02:37 PM. |
07-04-2010, 02:26 PM | #36 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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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. Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 07-04-2010 at 02:48 PM. |
07-04-2010, 05:00 PM | #37 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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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. Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 07-04-2010 at 05:26 PM. |
07-04-2010, 05:08 PM | #38 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
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. |
07-04-2010, 06:01 PM | #39 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
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. |
07-04-2010, 06:09 PM | #40 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
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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