Chapter 421

The day was warm, the energetic yellow star shining in the blue sky. Puffy clouds decorated the clear blue sky where two moons were evident. There were no jet contrails, no rings, no large constructs in the sky. Someone with a telescope perhaps could have seen the handful of satellites orbiting the world, but those satellites merely watched, not interfered.

On the surface were several scattered farms. Large affairs, complete with tractors and barns, corrals and fields, drying sheds and smoke houses. The houses were identical in layout but not in appearance or decoration.

While the tractors and drones that tended the fields were largely robotic, the beings who inhabited the houses were not.

The barn opened and a massive insectoid delicately stepped from the barn. It wore a leather abdominal wrap, a denim vest, and a buckskin satchel. Its look was topped off with the floppy hat on its head with holes cut for its antenna and a stalk of wheat in its mandibles.

It held a fat fowl in its hands and was petting it slowly with its bladearms.

The insectoid stepped into the sunlight and paused, raising its head and closing the cover over its compound eyes, its face raised to the sun. After a long moment it started moving again, heading to the front porch of the house. It sat in a strange chair that was a combination sawhorse and rocking chair, pulled the lever for the back to swivel into place, and leaned back slightly. It set the fluffy fowl in front of it, still petting it, and reached down to grab a piece of wood.

It sat, using one bladearm to carve the wood, the other to pet the fat and pampered fowl, and stared out at the field of grain that extended off as far as the eye could see.

Cordexen had to admit, life had suddenly turned good.

Farming was fulfilling after an eternity of high-tech slavery.

Plus, turkey was delicious.

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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

You doing OK, sis?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Yeah.

I kind of feel bad for them. All of them.

It's a good thing that they're at peace.

How did you know that it would work, letting them be farmers?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Same thing CONFED does to their people that are badly messed up. Primitivism therapy.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COLLECTIVE

Well, you'll be happy to know that they are indeed your ancestors.

There's some drift. Not too much that we can't track it.

They're probably the most clean Precursor species DNA we've gotten to examine.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

And they're alive.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COLLECTIVE

That too.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

That was strange. I don't understand why the smaller ones wanted to stay with the big ones.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

The 'servitor species' as the warriors put it, could hear the warriors begging them to talk but couldn't respond.

They're different than we are. I think they felt more comfortable with the ones who tried to shield them from that disgusting phasic domination system.

Speaking of which, what happened with that obscene device?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Examined, scanned, taken apart, put in storage.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

You should destroy it.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

You can't think of any reason to keep it?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

No. It's a grotesque systems designed to enslave my people to a computer system masquerading as a queen.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

And keep the servitor races non-sentient slaves.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Right! And keep us enslaved!

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

And prevent warriors and speakers from overriding the computer, much less the other castes.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Right! Enslaving us to a computer!

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

And protect you from the Atrekna shared consciousness.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Right! And protect us...

wait.

what?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

It was designed to keep the Lanaktallan and Atrekna psychic racial gestalt systems from overwhelming your people.

Hate to tell you this, sis, but we're getting some information that what happened may not be what everyone says it was.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Like what?

>squints at DASS

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Like your tech went in a different direction after you fled to our end of the Cygnus-Orion Galactic Stub.

Back originally, you used a lot more phasic systems, depended on your hive mind a lot more. It even looks like there were two different societies. One that preferred sentient prey one that preferred animals.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Are you sure? That doesn't sound right.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Straight from their computer systems and memories.

All of them are pretty talkative now that they've realized it isn't a trick, that they get to live out their lives in comfort and only talk via the hololink.

They're fine talking to us.

Terrans scare the hell out of them though.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

>laughs

Yeah, they got some common sense at least.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Where are they?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Sorry, classified.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

But... they're our cousins.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

BIOLOGICAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Barely.

Let's not tempt either of you.

Just let them go, sis.

Let them grow old and pass on.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

But...

...I want to love them.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

I know.

But I don't think they're able to understand that particular thing.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Fine.

What do we know of this Atrekna? Anything?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

They're one of the original three.

Psychic, but we knew that. Able to affect 4th Dimensional flow and energy, but we learned that in Hesstla. Shared consciousness with independent thought. Three and a half to four meters, eighty to ninety kilos. Prefer colder worlds, dimmer suns, usually in the red giant class, high CO and CO2, low O2 and nitrogen. Carnivores and Psyvores. Lethal reaction to Terran Descent Humanity neural tissue. Vulnerable to phasic weaponry, which is the primary weaponry they use. They often use massless phasic weapons.

This is all stuff we learned on Hesstla. Except for the original three and they jumped the Lanks and you Mantid apparently unprovoked.

Thing is, none of our new friends know much about them. They fought the Lanaktallan war castes, then the Lanaktallan Autonomous War Machines.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

So, nothing that helps us?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Not really.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

LEEBAW CONTEMPLATION POOL

We're going to see them again. They attacked Atrekna, but the Case Omaha stopped the Black Fleet from counter-invading.

They use wormholes.

Maybe they aren't from this dimension.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

CYBERNETIC ORGANISM CONSENSUS

Thatt's... that's an ugly thought.

Dimensional wars are nasty.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

You aren't wrong.

Speaking of something like that, any idea on how to get TerraSol loose?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COLLECTIVE

No. Not yet.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

I have a bad feeling we're going to need him.

And another bad feeling that we've only seen the first part of the attack on them.

And on the gripping hand, I've got the feeling this is going to get a lot worse.

For us.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

AKLTAK FREE FLIGHT

I hope not.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Me too.

Me too.