The Eosians...

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

When the personnel in Naval Command realized what just what a treasure
trove of information had arrived, against all odds, a surge of elation
spread through the upper circles of the Hegemonic government. Within
six months, the surviving Naval crew and Maladaran Resistance
personnel who had arrived at a remote Naval base had been brought to
the Hegemony Headquarters complex on Ashtra, one of the moons of Eosia
itself.

There the information was analyzed, the escapees were questioned over
and over by experts, who knew how to dig out bits of information that
the subjects did not themselve realize they knew. The entire picture
of the enemy was changed by the new information, and as it did, the
initial elation turned to horror, as the ghastly implications of the
new intelligence began to sank in at Naval Command.

The news that the Beasties were an artificial species, indeed the
creation of Homosentient life, was shocking enough, though it
vindicated the view of those biologists who had never believed
convergent evolution could produce them. The very idea that such a
horror could be artificially created by fellow Homosapients was deeply
unnerving. The news that the creator of the Beasties had transformed
himself into a monster by his own choice was somehow worse.

In two Terran decades of warfare, the Hegemony had never known of the
existence of the broodwyrms. Now, from information the Resistance
provided, they learned of the amazing abilities of those synthetic
creatures. They had known that something of biological nature was
often to be found at the heart of Beastie cities and bases, but they
had never known its nature. Now they understood.

They also understood that the existence of the broodwyrms meant that
their entire analysis of their current military situation had been
dead wrong.

After over 20 Terran years of intense warfare, both sides had reached
a state of near-exhaustion, their industrial/communication/command
infrastructures seriously eroded, their personnel barely functional
from fatigue, their economic resources strained to the breaking point.
Both were holding their own worlds and resources, but neither could
attack the other just then.

The Hegemonic military analysts had projected a race on each side to
rebuild their resources and renew their fleets and armies, but had
based their projections on the known rate of Beastie reproduction.
That had been bad enough, but it had left at least the possibility
that the Hegemony (which still had a muc larger total resource base)
could win the race.

But the broodwyrms could produce new Beasties in batches of millions
per year per broodwyrm. There were now many, many broodwyrms on the
Beastie-controlled worlds, and that meant that the Beasties were going
to renew their numbers, not in decades as the military analysts had
expected, but in all probability in five years or less. Only the time
necessary to restore their military/industrial resources would limit a
new Beastie offensive, and the enormous numbers of the enemy would
accelerate that considerably as well.

Where the Hegemony had been expecting major warfare to break out again
in about ten to fifteen Terran years, they now knew that they had in all
probability less than five Terran years left before the next round of
warfare started. Their analysis of their overall situation had gone
from 'very serious' to 'utterly desperate'.

Time was running out, and about what happened as it did...

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

With the new information, the Hegemony's military staff personnel
could project the most likely future trends, and all of them ran in
grim directions. In fact, the only thing that offered the Hegemony
any hope at all was the fact that both war machines were critically
dependent on a resource to which the Hegemony controlled most of the
access. That, of course, was orichalcum.

Indeed, even before the Beastie War, one of the key reasons for the
existence of the Hegemony was to keep orichalcum wars from tearing
civilization to pieces. In all explored space, only one significant
natural source of orichalcum was known, and that was the old mines on
Eos I, which had by this point nearly been worked completely out. No
other natural source of the miracle-substance had been found in
greater than trace amounts.

All the rest of the orichalcum in the Hegemony (and the few non-member
worlds with spacefaring societies) was derived from prerefined
sources, specifically from the old Helian ruins and fleet bases.
Small amounts of orichalcum were recovered from all sorts of Helian
ruins, usually in kilogram amounts in any given site that had any at
all. [1]

Still, there were many Helian worlds and Helian ruins, and probably
10% of all the orichalcum the Hegemony had was from such bits and
pieces. But the vast majority of the orichalcum available to the
Hegemony derived from various fleet sites that the Homosentient
explorers discovered. In the dying days of the Helian empire, many
such caches of ships and supporting equipment had been established
across the galaxy, for a later recovery that had never come. They
were treasure-troves of orichalcum, and archaeological data. Often
the archaeologists and orichalcum-recovery teams found themselves at
odds, but always the priority was the orichalcum.

The Hegemony distributed all gathered orichalcum to the
member-governments, without regard for the policies, nature, or
actions of those member-states. The formula for who got how much was
complex, and almost never tampered with, since such tampering, or any
perception of manipulating the supply, could have brought down the
Hegemony. [2]

The usual procedure, if an explorer discovered a supply of orichalcum,
was for the Hegemony to pay him/her 1% of the monetary value of the
substance, and feed the material into the supply stream. A 1-kg
orichalcum find could make an explorer rich enough to set himself up
for life. A 1-ton find could make an explorer rich enough to join the
aristocracy. Those explorers who discovered the huge fleet caches had
personal wealth at legendary levels. Fourteen such major caches had
been discovered, supplying over 80% of all the orichalcum in use in
the entire Hegemony.

The Beasties had to have orichalcum, but the only source was to take
it from the Homosentients. (They might have gone hunting for Helian
orichalcum on their own, but that would have taken a long time, been
highly chancy, and given the Hegemony precious time.) Since the
Homosentients guarded their orichalcum supplies as tightly as anything
they possessed, the Beasties were perpetually short of the
miracle-subtance. So were the Homosentients, of course, but not as
short of it, and that was now the only thing standing between the
Homosentient civilization and its utter destruction in the next few
decades.

There was another factor in play that neither side knew about:
NEMESIS.

From the POV of NEMESIS, it had a mess on its hands. While it shared
the goal of the Beasties (the total destruction of Homosentient
civilization, and ideally of the Homosentient peoples), the Beasties
were also on its target list, since it did not want any Solarigen
technical civilizations to exist, and at a cellular level, the
Beasties were still definitely Solarigen. To NEMESIS, replacing the
Homosentients with the Beasties was, at best, a wash. The Beasties
were, on average, a bit less intelligent than Homosentients, and
somewhat less creative and imaginative, but the bred at a fantastic
rate, and were remarkably tough and enduring.

The original plan NEMESIS had enacted, which had accidentally helped
bring about the creation of the Beasties, had been to stir up a civil
war among the Homosentients. NEMESIS now concluded that the best
course of action would be to modify that plan, and try to manipulate
the war between Man and Beastie to produce the greatest possible
damage to both sides. Ideally, they would wipe each other out, but
that was improbable. More likely, NEMESIS calculated, one side would
eventually annihilate the other, but be left so weak as to be easily
finished off afterward. It appeared to be at least a viable plan.

All through the first stage of the Beastie War, NEMESIS quietly,
secretly manipulated events, sometimes helping each side, sometimes
interfering, to maximize damage on both sides. Its Infiltrators, in
the shape of both Homosentient and Beastie, penetrated both sides and
worked to carry out the plans of their ancient master. Periodically,
NEMESIS arranged for 'accidents' that would benefit or harm one side
or the other, as convenient.

The plan was largely effective. In 20 years of warfare, Man and
Beastie inflicted fantastic harm on each other, fighting to a
semi-stalemate. NEMESIS was not entirely dissatisfied. But it had a
worry. Ironically, hidden in the Malus System, under the very heart
of the Beastie empire, was one of the Helian fleet caches, so well
concealed that it had not been found in over a thousand years of
Homosentient habitation in that star system. It was in fact hidden in
a vast underground chamber on a satellite of the gas giant Malus IX.
This body was covered in Helian ruins, and archaeologists had scoured
through it for many years, learning much about the Helians. But they
found no orichalcum, and the fleet cache was so well concealed that
they never ran across it in centuries of searching. NEMESIS knew
about it from the ancient datafiles its creators had given it, half a
billion years earlier.

If the Beasties discovered that vast treasure-trove of orichalcum,
they would be able to multiply their military power by orders of
magnitude in a very short time. NEMESIS calculated that they would
almost overrun the Hegemony within 100 years if they discovered the
depot, and that did not suit the murder-machine.

Regarding what came of all this...MORE LATER.


[1] The Helians had possessed much larger reserves of orichalcum than
the Hegemony ever did, thanks to their access to Ophiria System, but
even they had always tended to scour it out of any site they abandoned
or were driven from. The Homosentients were digging out tiny remnant
bits.

[2] The Hegemony made a point of keep orichalcum supply as separate
from all other considerations as possible. They had to, to keep the
system working. To give an idea of how absolute that rule was, if
Earth in the 1940s had been part of the Hegemony, the Allies and the
Axis would both have gotten their regular orichalcum allotments,
without regard for the moral or political or other actions of either
side, as long as the war remained contained to one world.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

One weapon that was inevitably very tempting to each side in this war
was basic and advanced forms of biological warfare. Since
Homosentients and Beasties were so different in so many ways, many of
the usual drawbacks of using bioweapons did not apply. Each side used
artificially altered diseases, parasites, and predators liberally, and
the death toll on each side from such weapons was horrific. Realizing
how little time they had before the Beasties would be ready to go 'on
the offensive' again, the Hegemony now began to resort to more
desperate measures, to buy precious time.

The Beasties, for their part, continued to strive to capture as much
of the precious orichalcum as they could. They knew they could not
hope to inflict a final defeat on their Homosentient opponents without
access to the miracle-metal, and during this 'lull' in the great war,
much of the Beastie military activity consisted of various techniques
to capture orichalcum from their enemies.

Meanwhile, however, another player was about to make their influence
felt.

Throughout the quarter-billion years since the Permian Extinction, the
efforts of NEMESIS had been quietly opposed by the fellows of its
creators (and indeed by some of its remaining creators who had changed
their views). The Helialisks had often effectively, if indirectly,
blunted the efforts of the murder-machine, and they remained a factor,
the other half of the legacy of the Helian empire.

The basic goal of the Helialisks remained unchanged: endure in
secrecy. They still had no wish to come to the attention of the
Eldren in any way, they still wished to ensure that the Eldren did not
even suspect that they still existed. They continued to exist in
secrecy, hiding their existence with half a billion years of habit and
skill, albeit in steadily dwindling numbers.

When the Last Helians had transformed themselves into Helialisks, they
had fully intended to last as long as the Universe could sustain them.
With the native ruthlessness of the Helian mentality, they were
determined to defy death without limit, and they had created (in the
face of daunting obstacles) the technological and sociological
infrastructure necessary to make the attempt.

But it was one thing to contemplate open-ended existence, and quite
another to live through nearly half a billion years. In that expanse
of time, even the incredible Helian ruthless will to live could and
did give way to boredom, exhaustion, and less-familiar alien states of
mind unamenable to continuance.

By this point in time, only about 1 in 10 of the original Helialisks
still remained conscious and functional, and most of the time these
remaining Helialisks were so somnolent, so absorbed by their own slow,
alien thoughts, that they might stir to directly affect the external
world no more than once in ten thousand years. But they still
could, if the wish took them.

They had often intervened to protect Solarigen life from NEMESIS,
driven not by moral qualm or sympathy, but by the recognition that the
more trouble NEMESIS made for the Eldren, the greater the risk that
the Helialisks themselves would eventually be discovered.

The Helialisks and NEMESIS had played their corners of the great game
for age upon age, both determined to hide from the Eldren. In recent
years (recent in this context meaning about 20,000,000 BC to the time
of the Beastie War), the Helialisks had become aware that NEMESIS was
working on some huge new project, and they concluded from their
observations and studies that NEMESIS was preparing a new galaxy-wide
super-attack, on the same scale or larger than the one it had
attempted to implement at the Permian-Triassic transition point. All
too aware that such an attempt, be it successful or not, could bring
the wrath of the Eldren down on them all, the Helialisks stirred a bit
and began seeking information about the effort, in hopes of quietly
heading it off.

It was probably accident that the Helialisks learned of the existence
of Homosentient life before NEMESIS did. Like NEMESIS, the Helialisks
had completely missed the emergence of sapient life until after the
Eldren had scattered the seed of Man all over the Galaxy. Unlike
NEMESIS, the Helialisks learned of the existence of Man well before
the emergence of technical civilization. At the time their probe
discovered Homosentients (on a world thousands of light-years from
either Sol or Eos), no Homosentient had yet moved into the technical
age, even the Eosians were barely at TL1.

The Helialisks found this mildly interesting, at best. They were too
old and too self-absorbed to care much, except insofar as they were
directly affected.

But they also recognized that these new sapient tool-users could, in
theory, eventually affect them. They kept a watch on that first world
they found, and they looked for more, and bit by bit they identified
thousands of worlds on which Homosentients existed, sometimes barely
hanging on, sometimes thriving.

The Helialisks discovered Eos System relatively early, one inhabited
system among thousands, but they watched as the people of Eosia began
to develop technological civilizations, as they learned to work tin,
copper, bronze, iron, steel, as they learned to draw power from
burning wood, burning coal and oil, fissioning uranium, and fusing
deuterium. They watched as these new sapients ventured forth from
their homeworld, and they watched an interstellar civilization rise
(with amazing rapidity, by their standards) from that start.

In all this, the Helialisks did nothing but watch. They watched, and
as they knew had to happen sooner or later, they noted when NEMESIS
discovered the new society as well. They waited to see what would
happen, but they, like NEMESIS itself, were used to thinking in terms
of tens of thousands of years and more. What actually happened, the
emergence of the Beasties and the start of the Beastie War, occurred
in only centuries, so fast as to seem almost instantaneous from the
POV of the Helialisks.

The Beastie War was alarming, because there was no telling how it
might spill out and create unexpected consequences. Also, the
Helialisks soon realized that the Beasties themselves were a problem
in a way the Homosentients had not been, their driving aggressiveness
was likely to bring them into directly conflict with the Helialisks'
own activities in a fairly short time, if they once overran their
Homosentient opponents. [1]

Recognizing that the Beasties were likely to eventually win their
struggle with the Homosentients, the Helialisks concluded that the
would have to take some action to alter that balance. Ironically,
they and NEMESIS were thinking in parallel on this point, each for
their own reasons. It did not suit either for the Beasties to rapidly
overrun the Homosentients.

MORE LATER.

[1] The calmer nature of the Homosentients meant that the Helialisks
could hope to hide from them far longer than they would be likely to
succeed in hiding from a triumphant Beastie species.

NOTE: Like NEMESIS, the Helialisks did not at this time know what had
happened to the Familiar Eldren. All they knew was that the Eldren
appeared to have vanished very recently, for no obvious reason.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Like NEMESIS, the Helialisks by nature and habit (millions of years of
habit) preferred to take the long view of matters. Patience was
second nature to them, and indeed first nature as well. But the
problem they faced with the Beasties demanded a more immediate
response. They did have some resources potentially useful in the
matter, though they were loathe to use them precipitously.

For example, unlike either the Beasties or the Hegemony, the
Helialisks had access to a relatively straightforward means of
real-time interstellar communications. Their FTL comm systems had no
more range than those of NEMESIS or the Beasties or the Homosentients,
but short range can be overcome by relays.

To create a system of relays over interstellar distances was
prohibitive for either the Beasties or the Hegemony, it would have
taken far too long, cost far too much, and required too much attention
to maintain. But the Helialisks suffered from no limitations of time,
they had existed for nearly half a billion years, which was time
enough to put relay systems of enormous scale and complexity into
place. Floating in deep interstellar space, these chains of thousands
of relays linked the star systems containing Helian Graveyards in real
time. [2]

In the immediate term, they began to very quietly sabotage the
Beastie side of the great struggle. It was subtle, but prepared and
executed by entities with hundreds of millions of years of experience
in analyzing patterns and recognizing subtle connections. They were
quite simply unmatched at the ability to pick out the lone loose
thread that could cause a large-scale unraveling.

The Helialisks, working through intermediary proxies of various sorts,
interfered with supply channels, subtly altered communications,
arranged for Hegemonic officers and personnel to 'discover' key bits
of intelligence at just the right time, and the individually small
actions rapidly began to add up to a serious reduction in
effectiveness for the Beasties, who had no idea why it was all
happening, so subtle was the activity of the Helialisks. [1]

They also initiated a long-term action. Their fear about the Beasties
was what would happen after they defeated the Homosentients. One
reason this was such a likely long-term prospect was the sheer speed
with which the Beasties could breed, even without the effect of the
broodwyrms. The Helialisks concluded that this breeding rate had to
be addressed, and that the broodwyrms were a problem calling for a
response, as well.

They drew upon their own very ancient history for a solution to the
Beastie breeding problem. Recalling the effects of the Helian Weapon
in the dying days of the Helian empire, they noted that one thing that
made that bioweapon so horribly effective was that it had a
multi-generational latency period. This had enabled it to spread
throughout the empire before its open effects appeared.

The exact effects of the Helian Weapon could not be replicated with
Solarigen life because of the different biologies. But the Helialisks
concluded that something similar could be achieved, and so they began
to breed a bioweapon of their own, with a very specific target
profile.

Ironically, they were aided in this by information from NEMESIS
itself. Because they had some of the command codes for the murder
machine, they could often compel it to reveal information it would
rather have kept private. Among those files was the vast amount of
information about Solarigen biology and evolutionary history that
NEMESIS had accumulated throughout the Phanerozoic.

When they had it ready, after only a few years (incredibly fast work
by the standards of the Helialisks), they infected a handful of
captured Beasties, and released them, having drugged them so deeply
that they never knew they had been interfered with. This infection
had no symptoms, it was a combined bacterial/viral infection that
merely installed itself in the infected Beastie and passed itself on
to the offspring. It was programmed to manifest its effects only
after several dozen generations of replication.

The infection was also sexually transmitted, so that each infected
Beastie infected every breeding partner, as well as its own offspring,
and thus all offspring of the breeding partner(s).

Like the ancient Helian Weapon, the key to the effectiveness of this
infection was its very long latency period. But the Helialisks were
nothing if not subtle and clever. They added another feature to their
creation.

Careful analysis of Beastie biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, etc,
had enable the Helialisks to identify subtle ways to make being
infected advantageous to the individual Beastie. An infected
Beastie gained an immunity to several diseases (including many of the
artificial diseases used by the Hegemony as weapons), gained
additional vitality, and otherwise found themselves strengthened by
the infection, in subtle ways. [3]

The Helialisks knew that if they made their infected Beasties more
competitive in the short term, the infection would spread more rapidly
and thoroughly in the longer term.

After so many generations of reproduction, the infected Beasties began
to reproduce less rapidly, producing few viable eggs and laying them
less often, and the potentially viable eggs they did produce were more
likely to fail to hatch. The Helialisks carefully calibrated the
degree of this, knowing that simple sterilization would be futile and
self-defeating (the uninfected Beasties would rapidly regain
dominance, and reproduction rates would soar again). Their infected
Beasties remained fertile, and the benefits they gained individually
from being infected offset their lower reproduction rate to a great
degree.

The net effect would be to tremendously reduce the overall
reproduction rate of the species over time, or so the Helialisks
hoped. It would not bring about their extinction, but it would make
the situation 'manageable'.

In the meantime, though, the war between Homosentient and Beastie
raged on, each side all unsuspecting of the other players in the game.

MORE LATER.


[1] NEMESIS also liked to use this 'subtle sabotage' technique, but
not even NEMESIS was as good at it as the remaining Helialisks were.

[2] NEMESIS would have had time enough to do this also, but it was a
lower priority for the murder-machine, especially since it would have
to have worked even harder at stealthing and misdirection to satisfy
its secrecy directives.

[3] In GURPS terms, they gained +1 HT, and a +1 to all rolls to recover
from damage, resist other diseases, and Immunity to some specific
diseases. They also gained a +1 in 'sex appeal' (in Beastie terms) by
subtle alterations to their pheromonal systems).

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As the military planners for the Hegemony had foreseen, once they had
the data from the Maladaran escapees, the next onslaught from the
Beasties came only a few years after the previous one ended. The
Hegemony had barely sufficient time to brace for it, and the second
wave of attacks was every bit as ferocious as the first.

The Beasties came on in incredible numbers, their losses replenished
at a fantastic rate by the resources of the broodwyrms. Indeed, the
Beasties were limited less by their need for new living soldiers than
by the limits of their orichalcum supply and industrial base.

The warfare that followed over the course of the next 30 years was the
most intense the Hegemony had ever experienced. As with all
interstellar warfare, it was really a collection of separate wars,
raging across each world. It was rare and unusual for space fleets to
engage in 'deep space', they usually waged war around planets, or at
least in the neighborhood of such.

The Hegemony fought hard, desperately, and with increasing skill and
will, and they slowed the Beastie advance to a crawl. But bit by bit,
one world after another fell to the endlessly renewed horde. As the
Beastie industrial machine grew, the pressure grew harder and harder
to hold back.

Sometimes, a combination of luck and skill enabled the Hegemony to
retake a captured world, but in most cases what was recaptured was
horrifying and demoralizing. The Homosentient population was usually
either entirely gone, often literally devoured, or reduced to a
desperate resistance, the planetary ecosystem transformed into an
alien form suited to the Beasties and the broodwyrms.

Many worlds were the site of such intense high-tech warfare that they
were nearly devastated, vast stretches of formerly verdant land and
sea irradiated, sterilized, boiled, blasted.

But year after year, bit by bit, the Hegemony lost ground to the
Beasties. By 31,192 BC, the Hegemony had lost over 7000 worlds, which
was a horribly effective psychological blow, because it meant that the
Hegemony had lost half its member-worlds to the enemy. Many of those
worlds had been jewels in the crown, rich in industrial, scientific,
and economic resources that could not be replaced. Worse, as the
Beasties captured world after world, they captured more and more
orichalcum, making them steadily more dangerous.

The wars settled into another lull at this point, yet again each side
had reached a state of near-exhaustion, one worse than before. But
yet again, the Homosentients knew that the Beasties would recover far
faster than they could.

The Hegemony was now a vast collection of heavily militarized worlds.
Where once a rich variety of societies, cultures, and governments had
interacted under the loose aegis of the Eosian Hegemony, now a vast
militarized near-dictatorship existed only to oppose the literally
implacable threat they faced from the artificial species. Almost
every male and many of the females were in the combat forces, starting
in their early teens. The elderly and those unfit for fighting manned
the remaining industrial base supporting the war. Daily life was
regimented, every necessity of life rationed, life an endless
struggle. For everyone under the age of 50 Terran years, this was all
they had ever known.

Still, with all the efforts of the Homosentients, they were losing,
and their leaders knew all too well that the next wave of assaults,
only a few years away, would be the worst yet. Barring a miracle, the
ultimate disaster of genocidal defeat was visible on the horizon.

Nobody was more surprised than the Eosians when the miracle happened.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As the Hegemonic leadership had calculated, the next wave of attacks
came all too soon, beginning in 31,186 BC. Opening with a new round
of invasion-landings on hundreds of worlds, the resumption of the
active fighting was met with ferocious resistance, the Eosians having
used their precious lull time to dig in and prepare for the storm as
best they could, and with a determination stoked the higher by the
horrible realization that this enemy simply could not be placated.

This latest wave of attacks was perhaps the most intense of the war to
date, the Beasties now holding an edge in both sheer numbers and
industrial plant. Only the fact that the Hegemony still had control
of considerably more orichalcum than the enemy had enabled the
desperate Homosentients to hold out until this point.

As world after world fell, the Hegemony teetered closer and closer to
the brink of collapse. The Beasties were able to strike deep within
the Hegemony's stars, cutting off entire groups of worlds from
communication with the Eos System. The 7000 remaining worlds were
whittled down, and down, until hundreds of worlds at a time were cut
off, their fate unknowable on Eosia itself. They might be fighting
on, they might have fallen, the people of the older worlds could not
know and had no way to find out, they were too busy fighting for their
own survival.

By 31,173 BC, after some thirteen Terran years of the heaviest
fighting that the Hegemony had ever experienced, a tremendously
successful serious of Beastie strikes succeeded in cutting off contact
between the Eos System and the bulk of the remaining Hegemony stars,
leaving the home world isolated (save for a couple of hundred other
planets still in contact).

The Beasties were still attacking, and the leaders of the Hegemony
knew that this time there would be no more lulls. The end was in
sight, probably no more than five years away by the guesstimates of
the General Staff.

It was then, with the end in sight, that the miracle few Eosians still
expected occurred.

The first sign of that miracle came disguised as news of disaster.
Word arrived that the planet Koraxia, a relatively near neighbor of
Eosia itself, had come under heavy Beastie attack, late in 31,169 BC.

Koraxia (Kor I) was only 60 light-years from Eos itself, and few had
dared imagine the Beasties would dare strike that close so soon.
But there was no option but to throw what forces were available into
the fight.

Koraxia was much too close to Eosia to be permitted to fall, and
moreover, it was one of the most heavily industrialized worlds of the
Hegemony. The Hegemony could not spare the industrial output of its
factories and shipyards, and they manifestly could not let the
Beasties capture the large amounts of orichalcum such industrial
facilities contained.

Thus a fleet of as many heavy warships and landing vessels as could be
spared from other critical defenses was dispatched to Kor System.

Defending Koraxia was easier, in some ways, than defending most
worlds. For thing, Koraxia was an airless rockball, dense with heavy
metals and radioactives, a larger version of Mercury (Sol I) in many
ways. It was one of three planets circling a blazing hot spectral
class B giant, the other two being huge gas giants. The rockball
world orbited Kor in the innermost position, resulting in a stellar
insolation seven times that of Mercury.

Plentiful raw materials (only orichalcum and 'volatiles' like CHON had
to be imported) and plentiful cheap energy, together with a total lack
of any biosphere to damage, had made Koraxia a wonderful place for
heavy industry, and after thousands of years of activity gigantic
industrial complexes had grown up, and the 'native-born' population
had risen to over 70 million, which was impressive for a non-biotic
world.

Now that lack of a biosphere made defending Koraxia easier, as well.

Along with the already extant defense forces in place, which included
a flotilla of heavy warships stationed in orbit, the locals had
constructed and adapted huge lasers, which concentrated local stellar
radiation into deadly multi-terawatt energy beams that could destroy
enemy ships at huge distances, ad they had filled local space with
automated 'mines', actually jerry-rigged automated solid-rocket motors
attached to guidance units, tipped with grams of laboriously produced
anti-hydrogen. They were crude, but effective.

In most places, such use of seetee would have been prohibitively
expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous, but Koraxia had enormous
amounts of nearly free energy, the necessary industrial facilities
ready at hand, had known for decades that the attack was coming sooner
or later, and had no living ecosphere to worry about damaging. Seetee
mines were thus a very practical choice. By the time the Beastie
attack actually came, there were thousands of such seetee-missiles
lying quiet in orbit around Koraxia or Kor itself, ready to lock on
target on command.

Between the formal military forces and the local additions, Koraxia
was putting up a tremendous fight even before the reinforcements
arrived. But the Beasties were arriving in incredible numbers, and by
all signs Koraxia was going to be overwhelmed before much longer.
Already large Beastie ground forces had reached the surface, and
fighting raged around every major city.

By the time the relief forces closed within FTL-com range of Koraxia,
the situation was desperate. The reinforcements could come no faster
than they already were, and the dire reports they could now receive by
ultracom could add no more their urgency. Koraxia was in dire need,
but help was still four days off and could come no sooner.

As they listened to the increasingly desperate messages, the admirals
of the relief fleet were beset by a feeling of utter futility, since
it was becoming clear that the battle was likely to be lost at least
30 hours before they could arrive.

Then, just as matters seemed hopeless, came news that the Beastie
attack had faltered on all fronts! This was welcome but utterly
unexpected news to the relief forces. Then came an even more
unbelievable message from the remaining defenders at Koraxia,
regarding the stunning reason for the sudden collapse of the
inexorable Beastie assault.

The Beasties were fighting each other!

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

At first the commanders of the relief fleet had difficulty even
crediting the reports that were coming in from Koraxia. While it was
well known to the Homosentients that the Beasties were often violent
between themselves on an individual basis, there simply was not one
single known, confirmed case, in decades of warfare, in which the
Beasties fought each other in an organized, military way. Certainly
many Beasties had faced their ends from 'friendly fire' incidents or
other unintentional errors in battle, but never before had any
Homosentient seen intentional intraspecific warfare among the Beasties.

But now all that had suddenly changed. Even as the Beastie space
forces had been on the edge of establishing firm control of the
orbital space around Koraxia, and the ground forces had encircled
every major city and base and begun to contract the nooses, various
Beastie spacecraft had suddenly opened fire on other ships in the
overall Beastie formation!

It was clearly not an error, because many ships had done so at the
same time, in places scattered all over the fleet formation. They
were perfectly placed for their mischief, and as the stunned defenders
watched in sheer incomprehension, the Beastie attack formation simply
fell apart.

It was also apparent that the rest of the Beastie fleet was caught
completely by surprise. For some little time, chaos reigned, and the
'traitor' ships, ready for this moment, inflicted tremendous damage on
their fellow Beasties. Entire dreadnaughts were reduced to scrap by
the efforts of 'cutters' and 'frigates', so total was the surprise and so
complete the disarray among the betrayed ships.

As the Beasties in space went, so went the ground forces. All over
Koraxia, the neatly organized and all to effective siege forces
suddenly found themselves caught up in an internal crossfire.
Mechapods, battlesuited infantry, heavy assault vehicles, and a myriad
other Beastie ground units were locked in battle with each other, the
siege suddenly set aside in the face of this stunning development.
Chaos reigned among the Beastie invasion force.

The defenders, naturally, were quick to shake off their shock. Though
they had no idea why such a bizarre thing was occurring among their
enemies, the leapt to take advantage. In space, with the carefully
calculated attack pattern broken, the Beastie fleet found itself being
vaporized by pulses from the few remaining 5 terawatt laser cannon
that had manage to survive the first attacks. Before their internal
fight had broken out, part of the Beastie fleet formation had included
ships keeping the remaining lasers occupied and unable to fire. Now
that protection was gone, and ships, squads, whole flotillas were
disabled by 5 terawatt pulses of ultraviolet light. [1]

The antimatter missiles were long since used up, but the remaining
warships, both manned and automated, now reengaged the enemy, and in
the ensuing multi-cornered cross fire, huge Beastie casualties began
to mount up. Backed up by ground-based anti-space weapons, the
Homosentient ships were now a deadly threat to the divided,
fratricidal Beastie assault force.

On the surface, the Homosentients threw themselves back into combat
with renewed vigor, and the divided Beastie ground forces took
tremendous losses, between their own internal violence and the newly
invigorated Homosentient forces.

To the continued surprise of the Homosentients, the Beasties did not
cease their fratricide even after it became clear that their disunity
was enabling their foes to annihilate or repel both factions. Even as
they lost ground, both literally on the surface of Koraxia and
metaphorically in space, the Beastie factions continued to fire on
each other. Indeed, as their retreat continued, it became clear to
the unbelieving eyes of their Homosentient enemies that there were
actually three factions all fighting each other in what had been a
unified assault force a day earlier.

Another 12 hours saw the relief force from Eosia arrive. Faced with
Koraxian defenders reinforced by 20 huge dreadnoughts and over 50
smaller ships, all freshly supplied and equipped with rested crews and
undamaged by weeks of fighting, the confused Beastie retreat now
became a chaotic rout.

The defenders tried to chase down and destroy the remaining attackers,
but there were too many of them fleeing on too many different trajectories
for that to be possible. They caught and destroyed many of the
remaining Beastie ships, but some of each faction did fight clear,
each faction's ships fleeing toward different parts of the sky.

To say that the Homosentients were stunned is an understatement. What
had been on the edge of becoming a catastrophic defeat had been
transformed into a huge (if costly in lives and treasure) victory, and
nobody could figure out why it had happened the way it did. There
simply was nobody who had any idea of what had possessed the enemy to
turn on each other that way at the key time.

Koraxia and its precious industrial capacity remained largely intact
and available for Homosentient use. The Beasties had suffered a huge
lose of personnel, and worse for them, materiel. The broodwyrms could
rapidly replace personnel, but war machines took longer and required
harder work and greater resources.

While the Beastie space forces had managed to get a few escapees clear
of the defenders, the Beasties on the surface were trapped there, at
the mercy of the defenders. On an airless planet, lacking the
requirements for life outside the cities, the trapped Beasties had no
hope. The Koraxians hunted out the handful of survivors in a matter
of days.

When word reached Eosia of what had just happened, the disbelief was
just a great as it had been on the scene. But to the amazement of the
Hegemonic leaders and warriors, over the course of the following
Terran year or so, it became clear that the Beastie internal fighting
was not an isolated incident. Reports came in from all the areas of
the galaxy that Eosia remained in touch with of multiple Beastie
factions taking more damage from battling each other than from the
efforts of the Hegemony. Some at first thought it was some sort of
enormous, elaborate trick, but the sheer scale of the damage and
losses on the Beastie side soon made it clear that whatever was
happening was quite real. Civil war now wracked the Beastie species
all over their realms.

Naturally, the Hegemony took as full an advantage of this as they knew
how, using the lowered pressure to renew their strength, and striking
where they could, especially wherever intraspecific warfare left the
Beasties exceptionally vulnerable. It soon became clear that all the
factions retained their full programmed hostility toward
Homosentients, but that programming was not usually sufficient to stop
the Beasties from fighting each other even when both sides of such a
battle came under human attack.

As the Hegemony caught their breath, dug in, and took advantage of the
miraculous development, the question across the Hegemony was the same:
why? WHY had the Beasties turned each other? What did
it mean?

The various Hegemonic intelligence services could provide no answer.
The simulations of the ARNETHIS AI could not discern a reason. Neither
the professional judgement of the military commanders nor the honed
political 'gut instinct' of the politicians could pin down the source
of the change. [2]

What was happening? There was an explanation, as we shall
see...LATER.


[1] These cannon could be 'pinned down' because they had to recharge
their storage cells between each 113 second burst of laser light. If
the enemy kept them too occupied to recharge their power cells, they
were effectively silenced.

[2] We shall learn more of ARNETHIS at a later date.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

For a look at what had happened to the Beasties, let us turn out
attention from the embattled core worlds of the Eosian Hegemony, and
cast out omniscient vision across the light-years to the Malus System,
and the planet Maladara. Maladara, formerly a jewel of the Hegemony,
a world so lush and clement as to be legendary across the civilized
star systems, a center of science, industry, and tourism, a scandal
and a daydream of tolerance and indulgence. But all those centuries
of accomplishment and success were cast into historical shadow by the
most infamous distinction of the planet: Maladara, birthplace of the
Beastie species and source point of the genocidal Beastie Wars.

It had been barely over a century since the first true Beastie had
been created, and since the creator of that first monster had
transformed himself into Beastie. Barely a century, and Maladara had
been transformed almost beyond recognition. Where once it had been a
glistening jewel, one of the most successfully Earth-like examples of
the Eldren's terraforming experiments, now it was a barely habitable
(for Homosentients) nightmare.

Where once it had been a tropical paradise across much of its surface,
shallow seas washing against beaches of shimmering sand, jungles awash
in life rolling up to the base of immense mountain ranges, all dotted
with cities that used the finest TL10 technology to combine utility
and beauty with cleanliness and safety, now it was a sweltering,
cloud-locked, choking morass of monsters. The ocean levels had risen
with the temperatures, and the higher vapor content had added to the
heat, until thickening cloud decks had increased albedo enough to stop
the increase.

Around each of the island-continents, the formerly shimmering shallow
seas were now covered in a thin layer of dark plant matter, a scum of
genegineered cells that converted sunlight with tremendous efficiency.
It worked at wavelengths that easily penetrated the cloud decks, but
even in visible light it was so effective that it looked almost black.
Likewise, on the shore, the natural plants were losing a battle with
the genegineered plants that converted sunlight into carbohydrates and
proteins and even fats for use by the broodwyrms.

The original broodwyrm, the living tool Koalidi had used to
manufacture the first Beastie, and the later generations that had
started the species, still lived, having grown to immense size, the
largest of them all, over a mile in diameter. But it had given rise
to others, and Maladara was dotted with the gargantuan creatures,
living factories to produce living products. The Maladaran biosphere
had been partly converted into an immense mechanism to feed the
broodwyrms, and the conversion continued. [1]

So voracious was the appetite of these creatures (to say nothing of
the stomachs of literally hundreds of billions of Beasties) that
additional sunlight was concentrated onto vast conversion-farms using
space-based optics. These concentrated pools of light enabled
genegineered plant life to thrive at a rate no naturally evolved plant
would ever match. [2][3]

The planet now played host to hundreds of billions of Beasties, and
along with that horde the broodwyrms had also produced other
creatures, ranging from modest variations on natural forms, to
creatures unlike anything any sane Homosentient would have imagined in
his or her darkest nightmares. In the transforming jungles, the
remaining Homosentient survivors contented not only with Beasties and
robots, but with monsters of a hundred sorts.

But now the busy activity that had characterized this orb of monsters
for a century had paused. The broodwyrms were quiet, producing no new
hordes of Beasties. The fleets orbited the planet, waiting for new
mission orders, which were not coming as they had been.

The reason for this pause was that out beyond the Malus System, among
the stars where Beastie and Homosentient had fought for a century now,
the Beastie juggernaut had turned on itself. When news of this came,
it had sent a shiver throughout the tiers of the Beastie hierarchy,
all the way to the very pinnacle.

That pinnacle could be found not far from the ruins of what had once
been the capitol city of Maladara. Still buried in the rich loam in
which it had been gestated and grown was the first and greatest of the
broodwyrms, the MasterWyrm, as Terrans would later dub it in hatred
and disgust. Grown to immensity, a hive of horrors, a maze of fecund
potential, it was also a sapient being, unlike most of its offspring
and grand+ offspring. A huge brain-core had been grown within it, a
living computer that, along with Koalidi himself, was the pinnacle and
center of power for the entire Beastie empire and species. [4]

Atop this vast buried creature, on the level land above, had been
constructed the fortress-palace-hive that was the residence of the
highest ranking Beasties. Koalidi himself, however, had come to prefer
spending almost all of his time within the recesses of the MasterWyrm,
near the immense intellect that had become something of his alter-ego,
the brilliant other half with which Koalidi plotted the extermination
and replacement of the genus that had once been his.

When news had come from the loyalist survivors of the Koraxia assault
that Beastie had turned on Beastie, transforming a near-victory into a
debacle, Koalidi had barely been able to credit the reports. As the
reports added up and it became clear that not only had the unthinkable
happened, but that those Beasties who did it had to have been planning
it for some time, Koalidi had sunk into something like a stunned state
for weeks. Then, as more reports began to come in, indicating that
similar things were happening all over the conquered worlds, Koalidi
had withdrawn into seclusion for months to brood and at time to shiver
with frustrated puzzlement.

What was happening should not even have been possible as far as
Koalidi knew! He had designed the Beasties so that absolute loyalty
to their own species first was literally hardwired into their brains.
They could and did fight each other on an individual level, over any
number of things, Koalidi approved of that, it kept the species fit
and eliminated the weak and unintelligent. [5]

But this sort of intentional, organized intraspecific violence should
have quite simply been inconceivable (except as a theoretical,
intellectual notion) to the Beasties. But it was also
incontrovertible that it was happening, and that as a result, the
entire war effort was stalling and the Homosentients were rallying,
regaining strength, and would soon be in a position to begin
reclaiming some of the losses they had suffered over the previous
decades. The Beasties continued to fracture, groups that had turned
on the original unity themselves breaking up into smaller warring
factions.

When he had gotten over his shock and fury sufficiently to act
rationally again [6], Koalidi emerged to confer with his MasterWyrm
collaborator/creation and they spent literally months of nearly
around-the-clock effort to figure out what had gone wrong. They
poured over every report, every scrap of intelligence, seeking the
problem. They considered the possibility that it was some tactic of
the Hegemony, and dismissed it. They considered the possibility that
some disease or other factor had infected the disloyal Beasties, and
were able to dismiss that one after a time. One after another, they
went through the possibilities, and came up empty.

Finally, after a year or more of work, they tracked down the problem,
and when Koalidi realized that it was, he reared back on his hind legs
and rubbed his razor-sharp forelimbs together, making the screaching
sound that was the Beastie equivalent of a scream of denial. His
frustration and anger and mortification was the most intense emotion
he had felt since his personal transformation.

MORE LATER.


[1] It was the alterations to the biosphere that had set in motion the
warming trend that had heated Maladara so sharply and so quickly. The
Beasties liked the conditions the planet was trending toward, and
were keeping a careful eye on the process to make sure it didn't run
out of hand.

[2] The genegineered plants Koalidi and his Beasties produced could
not have competed with natural plant life unaided. They were
ferociously efficient at photosynthesis and related processes, but at
the cost of neglecting other critical features that had to be made up
for by sapient intervention. But that was fine with the Beasties,
they had no objection to agriculture.

[3] The solar mirrors were also part of the reason for the global
temperature increase.

[4] Strictly speaking, Beasties are genderless. But since Koalidi was
once a Homosentient, we shall use the pronoun 'him'.

[5] Or so Koalidi saw it, anyway.

[6] What passed for rational behavior in Koalidi, anyway. His goals
were mad, but his means to achieve them were usually comprehensible.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The problem lay, he now realized, in an error he himself had made,
when he was first designing his superior beings. It was a tiny error,
one so subtle that neither Koalidi, nor his collaborators, nor the
MasterWyrm mind, had ever detected it, until it manifested itself so
unexpectedly in this civil warfare.

Written into the very DNA of the Beasties, encoded into the
neurochemistry of their brains and their pheromonal systems, was a
compulsive loyalty to their own species, that was for practical
purposes beyond any intellectual or emotional counter. It was part of
their essence.

But that system tagged their own 'species' according to a set of
pheromonal and telepathic cues that turned out to be just barely
mutable enough to be disastrous. Successive generations of Beasties
became just sufficiently different from each other that they came to
be unable to apply their instinctive species self-identification and
loyalty to the full species, but only to those more similar to
themselves. The other Beasties, the more distantly related ones, were
instead assigned the instinctive enmity the Beasties felt for the
'other', meaning other sapience of any sort but themselves and the
broodwyrms.

While this was less intense than their driven specific programmed hate
for Homosentients, it was still intense enough that the Beastie
instinct-loyalty, intended to make intraspecific warfare impossible,
actually made such warfare inevitable.

To make matters worse, the problem was almost impossible to correct!
Had it been recognized early, it would have been simple, but now there
were trillions of Beasties, all carrying the flawed 'programming'.
After so many generations of reproduction, the species instinctively,
irresistibly turned on itself.

The Beasties manufactured from the broodwyrms directly (as they had
been in batches of millions) were more reliable, but they too carried
the flaw, and their natural descendents sooner or later exhibited the
problem. To make it worse, a Beastie that associated with a group of
loyalist Beasties for a long time exclusively picked up their
telepathic/pheromonal 'tag' sufficiently that if that group 'went
rogue' they could easily carry the unrelated Beasties along with them!

The instinct could be locally overridden. The instinctive deference
to Koalidi himself remained, and any Beasties would set aside their
warfare at his command...while he was personally present. But it
would be only a short time after his personal presence was removed
before the warfare broke out again, and he could be in only one place
at a time.

Realizing that the problem lay at the very inner core of the species,
Koalidi immediately commanded that the broodwyrms stop production of
the creatures. That slowed the growth of the species enormously, but
the trillions of Beasties already extant were easily capable of
perpetuating the species by natural reproduction, there was no
immediate risk of extinction even with warfare from the Homosentients
and each other. But Koalidi still found himself faced with a nearly
insoluble problem arising from his subtle error a century before.

Koalidi pondered various ideas for a solution, but none seemed viable.
So matters stood as of about 31,166 BC. As for what happened
next...MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

With the Beastie forces having dissolved into hundreds of warring
factions, the Homosentients began to regain their strength. Koalidi,
still master of the largest single Beastie faction, watched in
helpless fury as the window of opportunity to finish off the Eosians
began to close. The separated groups of Homosentient worlds began to
regain contact with each other, and the remaining industrial base of
the defenders was working constantly to renew lost military resources.

The Beasties by this point had the collective resources to crush the
remaining Homosentient resistance, though it would take them some
time. But as long as the Beasties were at war with each other, they
could not carry out that goal.

Koalidi was profoundly frustrated by all this, but for some time he
could do little. It was over 15 years before a new development
changed the balance of power. The development was the discovery, in
the outer reaches of the Malus System, of a supply of orichalcum of
considerable size.

One group of Koalidi's Beasties worked, essentially, as
archaeologists. [1]

The most interesting archaeological site in the Malus System was to be
found in the outer part of the star system, specifically in the
enormous satellary system of the gas giant Malus IX. This was a
medium-scale gas giant, dimly lit by the distant sun of the Malus
System and attended by a system of 13 significant satellites (plus
over a dozen temporary moonlets, captured from the Malus System
equivalent of the Kuiper Belt).

Two of the 13 major satellites had been sites, half a billion years
before, of major Helian settlements. Both moons were covered with
extensive networks of Helian ruins, and the smaller of the two moons,
a globe of rock and ice 1200 miles in diameter, was almost covered in
them. This planet would have been less than tempting for most
Homosentient purposes, being covered in a layer of frozen water and
ammonia and other volatiles 200 miles deep, but for the ultra-frigid,
liquid-helium based Helians, it was quite useful and adaptable for
their needs, albeit unpleasantly hot by their standards.

For over 1000 years, Maladaran and other Homosentient archaeologists
had explored the vast, intricate ruins of the moon. After the
Beasties emerged and seized the star system, driving the few remaining
Homosentients into hiding and guerrilla warfare, they continued the
explorations. But in all this time and under all those studies, only
a fraction of the ruins had been explored. Many secrets remained to
be found, and in 31,150 BC, one of the greatest such secrets was
uncovered, thanks to the presence of a clumsy Beastie.

This particular Beastie scholar was clumsy because it had been maimed
by a bomb set by Homosentient resistance fighters on Maladara. The
bomb had destroyed two of the creatures' primary limbs, and damaged
its central nervous system, and the medical resources for treating
such were being directed to higher priorities than maimed
archaeologists. Thus it was that some years later, this scholar was
exploring the maze of ruins on Malus IX-D without its native
dexterity.

The icy crust of Malus IX-C was riddled with tunnels, dug over the
hundreds of millennia of Helian occupation. This scholar, along with
several other Beasties, was exploring one section of that vast
labyrinth, and managed to fall a bit behind the rest of the group.
The creature paused to examine a section of the intricate carvings
that ran along the walls of the passage, cut inches deep into the
rock-hard ice. Neither Homosentient nor Beastie scholars really
understood all of the ancient Helian scripts and symbols. Bits and
pieces had been penetrated, but in general it remained a mystery.

Had the creature not been maimed, it would not have stumbled when it
did. Had it not been clad in an environment suit, it would have been
able to catch itself with its remaining healthy limbs. But it was
maimed, and it was wearing an environment suit. It slipped, fell
sideways, falling against a plain-appearing section of the icy wall,
which gave way under the weight striking it.

The terrified Beastie barely had time to telepathically yell for help
as it slid into a previously unsuspected passage. The passage slanted
downward, and if the gravity of the planet was weak (only about .23
Terran standard), the smooth ice of the passage and the steep slant
mostly made up for that. The stunned and fearful scholar found itself
sliding downward at a steadily increasing speed!

The creature's companions, backtracking when they 'heard' the
telepathic cry, found the opening and saw the slanting passage, barely
big enough to pass a Beastie in an environment suit. They sent for
rescue equipment, and descended into the passage, using cables and
ropes to control their descent, and they found their missng companion
in a few hours. The tunnel proved to slide steeply down into a vast
underground chamber, an immense hollow space. Near where the tunnel
opened onto the level floor of the chamber, they found the corpse of
their fellow Beastie, who had slid out of the slanted passage,
helplessly slid across a smooth icy floor, and stopped when it hit a
metal surface.

The creature's environment-suit had been torn by the impact, and the
chamber was a vacuum. The Beastie had not lived long with its
protective suit shredded, and its bones and body damaged by the
high-speed impact already.

At first, they were not quite sure just what kind of chamber their
now-deceased compatriot had stumbled into. It was utterly dark, the
only light provided by the spotlights on their environment suits. But
it clearly held something important, since unlike the majority of the
ruins on the surface, the objects in this chamber contained at least
some elements made of metal, not various ices.

As stronger lights were brought into the chamber, and the Beasties had
a chance to really get a look at what they had found, curiousity
turned to awe. The chamber turned out to be immense, easily three
hundred meters from floor to ceiling in the high areas, the roof
supported by intricately balanced and prepared arches and columns of
ice and sometimes metal. The chamber was miles across, and it
contained starships!

There was really only one thing this could be, and the Beasties
recognized it instantly: it was one of the ancient Helian fleet
caches, the most legendary, most valuable treasure of which the
Hegemony and the Beasties had any knowledge.

Within Terran days of their discovery, the first Beastie military
personnel had arrived, and within Terran weeks the area was swarming
with engineers, soldiers, scientists, and decision-makers. Koalidi
himself arrived to look on the discovery with his own multiple eyes.

It was rapidly confirmed that the ships still contained their old
engines, and within those engines (and to a lesser degree other
systems) the orichalcum that made them work was still to be found.
This was only the eighth such cache ever discovered since the Eosians
developed space flight, and it turned out to be the sixth largest. It
contained mostly small vessels, but there were hundreds of them, and
altogether the Beasties had discovered a supply of orichalcum massing
in the thousands of tons.

To Koalidi, who had once been a Homosentient, this was almost
incomprehensible. In the days before the Beastie War, the discovery
of such a prize would have been enough to make the discover rich
beyond the dreams of avarice. Men and women who had discovered such
caches were known to own entire continents outright, to control
wealth dwarfing that of most of the ruling aristocracy.

For Koalidi and the Beasties, though, rather than wealth, this vast
supply of orichalcum was the greatest imaginable good news for their
stalled war efforts. Next to their internecine strife, the greatest
weakness of the Beastie war effort, indeed the problem that had dogged
them since the wars began well over a century before, was that their
only practical source of the precious orichalcum was to 'liberate' it
from their Homosentient enemies. Here, in this icy cave, hidden away
under the very center of their empire, had been a greater supply of
orichalcum than all that they had ever managed to steal from their
enemies. It was there for the taking, a treasure beyond belief in
their very heartland, and they had never suspected its existence, and
would likely never have but for the accident of a maimed Beastie in
just the right place, at just the right moment.

If the Beasties had still been unified, this discovery would have
spelled the final death knell for the Homosentients of what remained
of the Hegemony. But with the Beasties at war with each other,
Koalidi found himself in the position of holding the weapon that could
defeat his foes, and lacking sufficient soldiers to make use of that
weapon. Indeed, he dared not let the other factions learn of this
trove, lest it trigger new waves of intraspecific war.

Lacking that, Koalidi found himself faced with a frustration in which
is psychotic impatience warred with his prudent caution. In the end,
this drove him to an action that would irreversibly alter the path of
history.

But about that...MORE LATER.


[1] It should be kept in mind that the Beasties are fully sapient,
with intellectual interests, curiousity, and the other traits of such
life. They are not, on average, as curious and intellectually
diverse as Homosentients, but they are far more than mere living
killing machines.