First Contact

Chapter 924: Edge of Twilight

Archeological digs involving The Builders are always risky.

Will you discover an autonomous factory complex, missing only some parts production? Will you just find another one of the strange orbs they seemed to worship? Will you be killed by their automated death systems?

Or will you just discover an empty facility with KILROY WAS HERE and genitalia scrawled on the walls?

Every Builders dig should be approached with trepidation.

The Builders hated everyone and their works show it. - Archeology Student Lecture, 2381 Current Era

It's frustrating. We know what The Builders looked like. We have found plenty of remains.

There are species who existed when the Builders existed, and archeological evidence shows that at one time they were allied with or at least knew of The Builders.

But none of them will speak of them.

Yes, the Builders have been gone for tens of thousands of years, but what manner of beings were they that even today the reclusive Treana'ad and Telkan refuse to speak of them? What manner of beings were they that the Lanaktallan refuse to answer questions regarding The Builders.

What happened?

And who did The Builders hate so much that they created such terrible works? - Thoughts of Previous Galactic Eras, 1738 Current Era

If your archeological dig involving the Treana'ad, Telkan, Lanaktallan, or other mostly peaceful Forerunner races ever finds evidence of The Builders I have one and only one piece of advice for you.

Run. - Archeology Student Lecture, 1862 Current Era

What the researchers and archeologists will not tell you is simple: the ruins and relics of the Forerunner race The Builders are of vital interest to every star nation.

Their weaponry was esoteric and strange. Somehow they made obsolete kinetic weaponry viable on the battlefield against such things as the Precursor Autonomous War Machines. They were militarily overwhelmingly powerful.

Superweapons that have ended entire wars that had raged for centuries have been unearthed in Builder ruins. These were semi-functional weapon systems, of limited use, that required vast resources just to move into position, power up, and deploy.

Yet their great power ended wars.

Those weapons should be used, deployed, to protect existing star nations. To ensure their primacy in this galaxy now and forever!

The faint-hearted and cowardly researchers, scientists, and archeologists warn every being to stay away from the ruins of the Forerunner race The Builders.

What secrets, what power*, are they keeping for themselves?* - Extract from the mobilization to the Dust Wars, 2273 Current Era

The horror.

The horror. - Last transmission. The Dust War. 2281 Current Era

() Doki Doki Doki () - Garbled Transmission, 2279 Current Era

The Atrekna forces reeled back from the onslaught as even more aerospace fighters crested the horizon, crazily piloted at less than a hundred meters above the ground. They dropped their stealth, the battlescreens erupting to full power and exploding the tops of trees. Weapon pods deployed and phasic seeking warheads slashed out at the Atrekna forces.

gitcha gitcha gitcha gitcha crackled and snarled along phasic frequencies as the missiles's warbois jumped up and down and shrieked in glee.

Atrekna servitor positions were hammered by the rockets, the point defense systems already down and destroyed. The servitors huddled down in their trenches, foxholes, and bunkers, holding tight to their weapons and hoping they'd survive the rocket attack.

The stealth fighters swept over the Atrekna lines and long cigar-shaped munitions dropped from the bottom.

Tesseract-compressed spooky particle FOOF enhanced napalm erupted in a long line, filling trenches and foxholes, covering bunkers, reinforced command emplacements, and fortifications. The FOOF-N devoured all the oxygen, ripping it out of the bunkers and emplacements, the heat spiking into astronomical temperatures hot enough to slag even battlesteel.

The stealth fighters engaged their systems and vanished even as the Atrekna leadership caste shrieked at them.

STOP DOING THAT, LEMURS!

Two of the stealth fighters didn't turn back on their stealth, just suddenly spinning and dropping from the sky, hitting the ground and exploding.

The ones in stealth, one suddenly dropped from the sky, exploding when it impacted the ground.

The Atrekna knew that they had not caused it.

Well, not really.

The effects of the De-Evolutionary Regression Attack were still moving through the Mad Lemurs of Terra.

Not that it was happening fast enough to help.

A trio of Atrekna turned as another Atrekna stumbled from the wreckage the trio was hiding in. It was holding its stomach and the others could see purple blood on its robe. It made a keening noise, the psychic emanations from it nothing but pain, fear, and agony.

It stumbled over to them, two of the trio eagerly looking forward to dragging the wounded one off and implanting larva in it.

Once it reached them it looked up.

Its eye fell out, revealing a red lensed camera.

"Fuck you, asshole," it said, it's psychic 'voice' heavily accented.

And exploded.

On the plains, the armored vehicles that the Atrekna had sent their servitors out in were being destroyed by a combination of close air support, enemy armored vehicles, artillery support, and infantry support. The enemy forces swept aside the Atrekna forces with no more effort than it took them to reload their weapons.

Across the super-continent, it was a disaster.

There had been weeks, months of quiet, during which the Atrekna that had fled a losing fight against the Mad Lemurs had counselled the others in just what kind of forces that Mad Lemurs could build out of seemingly nothing.

Most of them had been ignored. A fifth of them had been assassinated with half of those actually used to host larvae. Very few had listened to the survivors of what had been a terrible battle for possession of a planet.

During those weeks, the Atrekna built up their forces for a counter-attack. Replicating their troops over and over.

It had started suddenly.

A massive Ohm class slavespawn had slowly crawled from a damaged gate. The gate had been online since the Attack of the Living Dead Lemurs and the machinery to shut it down had been chronoshifted to be slightly out of synch.

Unfortunately, the Atrekna crew had brought a single Lemur imprint with them.

It had killed them all.

Now, the controls were just out of reach for the rest of the Atrekna. They couldn't shut down the portal, but they could alter its vibrational frequency just a little bit to make it unappealing.

Then the Ohm Class Slavespawn had moved through the gate, which had collapsed with the crack of displaced air. The mass of the slavespawn had proved too much for the damaged and unmonitored mechanisms, which had failed. The slavespawn had the coloration of a lost section of the Second Spoked Offensive, and it showed its age by its size and the strange crystal growths down its back and on its head, just above its multiple eyes.

The Atrekna knew now that the Ohm Class Slavespawn crossing reality and onto the planet had been the real start of what was happening now.

The slavespawn had moved to a large herd, slowly munching its way across the huge supercontinent. Once in a while a smaller slavespawn, still immature, would break away from the herd and hunker down, slowly munching away.

The Atrekna now knew those were not slavespawn.

They had been small lemur outposts.

Finally, the herd had reached the mountain chain that made an X across the supercontinent. They had, one at a time, pushed forward and into the huge stagnant fresh-water inland sea.

Except for the one with the crystalline growths.

It had stopped at the edge, munching on the algae and flora at the edge of the inland sea sized forested swamp.

Smaller slavespawn kept surfacing from the water and crawling out of the inland sea to cluster near the ancient Ohm class slavespawn.

The Atrekna noticed it had not moved in some time and sent a trio of Atrekna out to encourage it to move, since the crystalline growths seemed to interfere with Atrekna commands to its dim mind.

When the Atrekna reached it was when everything came apart on everyone.

The Ohm class slavespawn flickered and vanished to reveal a low, sloped wall armored building of Substance-W. The smaller ones flickered and vanished, revealing other buildings, including fusion generators pulling fuel from the inland sea's mineral rich water.

The three Atrekna had time to scream before the point defense systems ripped them apart.

The smaller Ohm class slavespawn that had peeled away from the herd flickered and revealed themselves to be more facilities.

Every facility put out strobing flashes of chronotron jamming. Hidden temporal stabilizers spun up to full power.

Missiles launched from hidden launchpads and concealed mobile launchers. Jets launched from buildings. Lemur troops crawled out of heavily armored and armed bunkers to attack Atrekna positions. Armored vehicles and warmeks left buildings to attack Atrekna forces.

In less than 24 hours the entire super-continent was engaged in warfare.

By hour 51 the Atrekna realized something they had never thought possible.

They were losing.

They stepped up their temporal replication and concentrated on eliminating the annoyingly effective lemur temporal jammers.

At first it looked like it was working.

Then the lemur's tactics revealed another strategy.

Atrekna that returned from failed missions, always wounded, would suddenly explode or have spinning and howling sawblades and knives erupt from their flesh as they attacked other Atrekna. Examination showed that the Atrekna corpses had been filled with robotics and strange lemur devices.

The second time the bodies erupted into even smaller robots, all armed with sawing knives and spinning sawblades, making a loud screeching noise, the Atrekna would stand off and destroy the fake Atrekna with explosives.

Then the fake Atrekna would just explode. Or release a cloud of poison gas. Or open its mouth and breathe out a cloud of stinging insects that would then nest in the body of any paralyzed Atrekna. Within a week, the insect attacked Atrekna would get up and start staggering around, the yellow and black insects crawling in and out of sores, looking for more Atrekna to breathe bees on.

The Atrekna could do nothing but shriek STOP DOING THAT, LEMUR! and try to come up with a counter.

Except, every counter, the bedamned lemur just added new tactics to its arsenal.

Within a week, the lemur owned nearly 22% of the supercontinent, not counting the X of the mountain ranges. Possession of the mountain ranges let the lemurs cut off each section of the X from one another.

With horror, the Atrekna realized that while the lemur was attacking the entire front, it was pushing hard on the smallest section of the X, tasking the majority of its forces into pushing back the Atrekna in that location.

The lemur intended on owning part of the X where it could operate with impunity.

The Atrekna responded by boosting their efforts to reinforce that region. All of the other regions began putting more and more resources into defending that X.

That's when the attack from the massive planet-spanning ocean came. Fast attack craft, amphibious landings of tens of thousands of lemurs, offshore bombardment by wet-water naval ships that just seemed to be a buoyant shell wrapped around more guns than was reasonable.

The Atrekna were getting a master level class on combined arms.

They weren't liking it.

They weren't doing well either.

There wouldn't be any 'see me after class' for the Atrekna, and they knew it.

The Atrekna ordered their space vessels in to provide orbital support.

The damnable lemur launched space capable craft from the middle of the massive ocean, on the opposite side of the planet from the Atrekna.

The lemurs held the high orbitals. Made landings on both orbital bodies and dug in hard.

Then counter-attacked the space forces.

One group of Atrekna, tasked with examining wreckage and bodies of the lemurs noted something strange.

They were fighting the same thirty lemurs.

Yes, there was slight differences. A few scars, some tattoos, maybe hair and eye color, but deep level phasic examination showed that the bodies were the same lemurs.

Over and over and over.

But they could not detect any temporal replication.

The other Atrekna scoffed at the idea.

The Atrekna were wrong.

It wasn't thirty different lemurs.

It was one.

WELCOME BACK, COMMANDER.